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J5iljct£ii>c €&ition 


CONDUCT OF LIFE 

BEING VOLUME VI. 

OF 


EMERSON’S COMPLETE WORKS 



THE 


CONDUCT OF LIFE 


BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

u 


ifteto ant* Eeinart Cfcttton 



BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 
(CJje CtiBcrstDe press, <£ambriD0e 
1 888 


C.Op'vj l 



Copyright, 1S60, 

By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, and 1888, 

By EDWARD W. EMERSON. 

All rights reserved. 





The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotype! and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 


CONTENTS 


f— 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Fate 7 

II. Power 53 

III. Wealth ^ 83 

IV. Culture^ 125 

Y. Behavior 3o 161 

VI. Worship hv 191 

VII. Considerations by the Way . . .231 

VIII. Beauty 265 

IX. Illusions 1 291 



FATE. 


Delicate omens traced in air 
To the lone bard true witness bare 
Birds with auguries on their wings 
Chanted undeceiving things 
Him to beckon, him to warn ; 

"Well might then the poet scorn 
To learn of scribe or courier 
Hints writ in vaster character ; 
And on his mind, at dawn of day, 
Soft shadows of the evening lay. 
For the prevision is allied 
Unto the thing so signified ; 

Or say, the foresight that awaits 
Is the same Genius that creates. 















































FATE. 


It chanced during one winter a few years ago, 
that our cities were bent on discussing the theory 
of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five 
noted men were each reading a discourse to the 
citizens of Boston or New York, on the Spirit of 
the Times. It so happened that the subject had 
the same prominence in some remarkable pam- 
phlets and journals issued in London in the same 
season. To me however the question of the times 
resolved itself into a practical question of the con- 
duct of life. How shall I live? We are incom- 
petent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot 
span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, be- 
hold their return and reconcile their opposition. 
We can only obey our own polarity. ’T is fine for 
us to speculate and elect our course, if we must 
accept an irresistible dictation. 

In our first steps to gain our wishes we come 
upon immovable limitations. We are fired with 
the hope to reform men. After many experiments 
we find that we must begin earlier, — at school. 
But the boys and girls are not docile ; we can make 
nothing of them. We decide that they are not of 


10 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


good stock. W e must begin our reform earlier still, 
— at generation : that is to say there is Fate, or 
laws of the world. 

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dicta- 
tion understands itself. If we must accept Fate, 
we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the sig- 
nificance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, 
the power of character. This is true, and that 
other is true. But our geometry cannot span these 
extreme points and reconcile them. What to do? 
By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if 
you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last 
its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts 
we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable 
hope of harmonizing them. We are sure that, 
though we know not how, necessity does comport 
with liberty, the individual with the world, my po- 
larity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of 
the age has for each a private solution. If one 
would study his own time, it must be by this 
method of taking up in turn each of the leading 
topics which belong to our scheme of human life, 
and by firmly stating all that is agreeable to expe- 
rience on one, and doing the same justice to the op- 
posing facts in the others, the true limitations will 
appear. Any excess of emphasis on one part would 
be corrected, and a just balance would be made. 

But let us honestly state the facts. Our Amer- 


FATE. 


11 


ica has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, 
great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, 
but perceivers of the terror of life, and have 
manned themselves to face it. The Spartan, em- 
bodying his religion in his country, dies before its 
majesty without a question. The Turk, who be- 
lieves his doom is written on the iron leaf in the 
moment when he entered the world, rushes on the 
enemy’s sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the 
Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate : 

“ On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave, 

The appointed, and the unappointed day ; 

On the first, neither halm nor physician can save, 

Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay. 5 ’ 

The Hindoo under the wheel, is as firm. Our Cal- 
vinists in the last generation had something of the 
same dignity. They felt that the weight of the 
Universe held them down to their place. What 
could they do ? Wise men feel that there is some- 
thing which cannot be talked or voted away, — a 
strap or belt which girds the world : — 

** The Destiny, minister general, 

That executeth in the world o’er all, 

The purveyance which God hath seen beforne, 

So strong it is, that though the world had sworn 
The contrary of a tiling by yea or nay, 

Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day 
That falleth not oft in a thousand year ; 

For, certainly, our appetites here, 


12 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love, 

All this is ruled by the sight above.” 

Chaucer : The Knighte’s Tale. 

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense. 
“ Whatever is fated, that will take place. The 
great immense mind of Jove is not to be trans- 
gressed.” 

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. 
The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed 
to village theologies, which preach an election or 
favoritism. And now and then an amiable parson, 
like Jung Stilling or Robert Huntington, believes 
in a pistareen - Providence, which, whenever the 
good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody 
shall knock at his door and leave a half-dollar. 
But Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset 
or pamper us. We must see that the world is 
rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man 
or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of 
dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles 
your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like 
an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, grav- 
ity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of 
Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and 
spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and 
bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey 
in the coil of the anaconda, — these are in the sys- 
tem, and our habits are like theirs. You have 


FATE. 


13 


just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter- 
house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, 
there is complicity, expensive races, — race living 
at the expense of race. The planet is liable to 
shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, 
rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations 
of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry up 
by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. 
Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon an 
earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples three 
years ago ten thousand persons were crushed in a 
few minutes. The scurvy at sea, the sword of the 
climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Pan- 
ama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre. 
Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. 
The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mor- 
tal to some tribes as a frost to the crickets, which, 
having filled the summer with noise, are silenced 
by a fall of the temperature of one night. Without 
uncovering what does not concern us, or counting 
how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx, or 
groping after intestinal parasites or infusory biters, 
or the obscurities of alternate generation, — the 
forms of the shark, the labrus , the jaw of the sea- 
wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the 
grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, are 
hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us 
not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, 


14 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no 
use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumen- 
talities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in 
a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in 
divinity. 

Will you say, the disasters which threaten man- 
kind are exceptional, and one need not lay his ac- 
count for cataclysms every day ? Aye, but what 
happens once may happen again, and so long as 
these strokes are not to be parried by us they must 
be feared. 

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive 
to us than the stealthy power of other laws which 
act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is 
fate ; — organization tyrannizing over character. 
The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, 
is a book of fate ; the bill of the bird, the skull of 
the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So 
is the scale of races, of temperaments ; so is sex ; 
so is climate ; so is the reaction of talents imprison- 
ing the vital power in certain directions. Every 
spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house 
confines the spirit. 

The gross lines are legible to the dull ; the cab- 
man is phrenologist so far, he looks in your face to 
see if his shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes 
one thing, a pot-belly another; a squint, a pug- 
nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis, 


FATE. 


15 


betray character. People seem sheathed in their 
tough organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doc- 
tors, ask Quetelet if temperaments decide nothing ? 
— or if there be anything they do not decide ? 
Read the description in medical books of the four 
temperaments and you will think you are reading 
your own thoughts which you had not yet told. 
Find the part which black eyes and which blue 
eyes play severally in the company. How shall a 
man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from 
his veins the black drop which he drew from his 
father’s or his mother’s life ? It often appears in a 
family as if all the qualities of the progenitors were 
potted in several jars, — some ruling quality in each 
son or daughter of the house ; and sometimes the 
unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, 
the family vice, is drawn off in a separate indi- 
vidual and the others are proportionally relieved. 
We sometimes see a change of expression in our 
companion and say his father or his mother comes 
to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote 
relative. In different hours a man represents each 
of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven 
or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin, — seven 
or eight ancestors at least ; and they constitute 
the variety of notes for that new piece of music 
which his life is. At the corner of the street you 
read the possibility of each passenger in the facia] 


16 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye. 
His parentage determines it. Men are what their 
mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom 
which weaves huckaback why it does not make 
cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a 
chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the dig- 
ger in the ditch to explain Newton’s laws ; the fine 
organs of his brain have been pinched by overwork 
and squalid poverty from father to son for a hun- 
dred years. When each comes forth from his 
mother’s womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. 
Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one 
pair. So he has but one future, and that is already 
predetermined in his lobes and described in that 
little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the 
privilege and all the legislation of the world can- 
not meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of 
him. 

Jesus said, “When he looketh on her, he hath 
committed adultery.” But he is an adulterer be- 
fore he has yet looked on the woman, by the super- 
fluity of animal and the defect of thought in his 
constitution. Who meets him, or who meets her, 
in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each 
other’s victim. 

In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital 
force, and the stronger these are, the individual is 
so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, 


FATE. 


17 


the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth 
to some superior individual, with force enough to 
add to this animal a new aim and a complete ap- 
paratus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly 
forgotten. Most men and most women are merely 
one couple more. Now and then one has a new 
cell or camarilla opened in his brain, — an archi- 
tectural, a musical, or a philological knack ; some 
stray taste Cr talent for flowers, or chemistry, or 
pigments, or story-telling ; a good hand for draw- 
ing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for 
wide journeying, &c. — which skill nowise alters 
rank in the scale of nature, but serves to pass the 
time ; the life of sensation going on as before. At 
last these hints and tendencies are fixed in one or 
in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and 
force as to become itself a new . centre. The new 
talent draws off so rapidly the vital force that not 
enough remains for the animal functions, hardly 
enough for health; so that in the second genera- 
tion, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly 
deteriorated and the generative force impaired. 

People are born with the moral or with the ma- 
terial bias ; — uterine brothers with this diverging 
destination ; and I suppose, with high magnifiers, 
Mr. Frauenliofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to 
distinguish in the embryo, at the fourth day, — « 
this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler. 


VOL. VI. 


18 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain 
of Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race with 
liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, “Fate is 
nothing hut the deeds committed in a prior state 
of existence.” I find the coincidence of the ex- 
tremes of Eastern and Western speculation in the 
daring statement of Schelling, “ There is in every 
man a certain feeling that he has been what he is 
from all eternity, and by no means became such 
in time.” To say it less sublimely, — in the his- 
tory of the individual is always an account of his 
condition, and he knows himself to be a party to 
his present estate. 

A good deal of our politics is physiological. 
Now and then a man of wealth in the heyday of 
youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In 
England there is always some man of wealth and 
large connection, planting himself, during all his 
years of health, on the side of progress, who, 
as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward 
play, calls in his troops and becomes conservative. 
All conservatives are such from personal defects. 
They have been effeminated by position or nature, 
born halt and blind, through luxury of their par- 
ents, and can only, like invalids, act on the de- 
fensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New 
Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, 
Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until 


FATE. 


19 

their life ebbs and their defects and gout, palsy 
and money, warp them. 

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities 
and nations, in the healthiest and strongest. Prob- 
ably the election goes by avoirdupois weight, and 
if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hun- 
dred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a 
town on the Dearborn balance, as they passed the 
hay-scales, you could predict with certainty which 
party would carry it. On the whole it would be 
rather the speediest way of deciding the vote, to 
put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at 
the hay-scales. 

In science we have to consider two things ; 
power and circumstance. All we know of the egg* 
from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; 
and if, after five hundred years you get a better 
observer or a better glass, he finds, within the last 
observed, another. In vegetable and animal tis- 
sue it is just alike, and all that the primary power 
or spasm operates is still vesicles, vesicles. Yes, 
— but the tyrannical Circumstance! A vesicle 
in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in dark- 
ness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a 
plant. Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers 
changes which end in unsheathing miraculous ca- 
pability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks 
itself to fish, bird, or quadruped, head and foot, 


20 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature. Na- 
ture is what you may do. There is much you may 
not. We have two things, — the circumstance, and 
the life. Once we thought positive power was 
all. Now we learn that negative power, or circum- 
stance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circum- 
stance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, the 
ponderous, rock-like jaw ; necessitated activity ; 
violent direction ; the conditions of a tool, like the 
locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which 
can do nothing but mischief off of it ; or skates, 
which are wings on the ice but fetters on the 
ground. 

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She 
turns the gigantic pages, — leaf after leaf, — never 
re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor 
of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of 
slate ; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal ; a 
thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud : veg- 
etable forms appear ; her first misshapen animals, 
zoophyte, trilobium, fish ; then, saurians, — rude 
forms, in which she has only blocked her future 
statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters 
the fine type of her coming king. The face of the 
planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and 
man is born. But when a race has lived its term, 
it comes no more again. 

The population of the world is a conditional 


FATE. 


21 


population ; not the best, but the best that could 
live now ; and the scale of tribes, and the steadi- 
ness with which victory adheres to one tribe and 
defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposi- 
tion of strata. We know in history what weight 
belongs to race. We see the English, French, and 
Germans planting themselves on every shore and 
market of America and Australia, and monopo- 
lizing the commerce of these countries. We like 
the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch 
of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, 
of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much 
will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in 
vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of 
Knox, in his “ Fragment of Faces ; ” — a rash and 
unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent 
and unforgetable truths. “Nature respects race, 
and not hybrids.” “ Every race has its own hab- 
itat” “ Detach a colony from the race, and it de- 
teriorates to the crab.” See the shades of the 
picture. The German and Irish millions, like 
the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their 
destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic and 
carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to 
make corn cheap and then to lie down prematurely 
to make a spot of green grass on the prairie. 

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages 
is the new science of Statistics. It is a rule that 


22 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the most casual and extraordinary events, if the 
basis of population is broad enough, become mat- 
ter of fixed calculation. It would not be safe to 
say when a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like 
Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch would 
be born in Boston ; but, on a population of twenty 
or two hundred millions, something like accuracy 
may be had . 1 

’T is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of par- 
ticular inventions. They have all been invented 
over and over fifty times. Man is the arch ma- 
chine of which all these shifts drawn from himself 
are toy models. He helps himself on each emer- 
gency by copying or duplicating his own structure, 
just so far as the need is. ’T is hard to find the 
right Homer, Zoroaster, or Menu ; harder still to 
find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or 
Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton ; the indisputable 
inventor. There are scores and centuries of them. 
“ The air is full of men.” This kind of talent so 
abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, 
as if it adhered to the chemic atoms ; as if the air 

1 “ Everything which pertains to the human species, con- 
sidered as a whole, belongs to the order of physical facts. 
The greater the number of individuals, the more does the 
influence of the individual will disappear, leaving predomi- 
nance to a series of general facts dependent on causes by 
which society exists, and is preserved.” — Quetelet. 


FATE. 23 

he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins, 
and Watts. 

Doubtless in every million there will be an as- 
tronomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. 
No one can read the history of astronomy without 
perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are 
not new men, or a new kind of men, but that 
Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Ar- 
istarchus, Pythagoras, CEnipodes, had anticipated 
them ; each had the same tense geometrical brain, 
apt for the same vigorous computation and logic ; 
a mind parallel to the movement of the world. 
The Homan mile probably rested on a measure of a 
degree of the meridian. Mahometan and Chinese 
know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian 
calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. 
As in every barrel of cowries brought to New Bed- 
ford there shall be one orangia , so there will, in a 
dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one 
or two astronomical skulls. In a large city, the 
most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in 
their casualty, are produced as punctually and to 
order as the baker’s muffin for breakfast. Punch 
makes exactly one capital joke a week ; and the 
journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news 
every day. 

And not less work the laws of repression, the 
penalties of violated functions. Famine, typhus, 


24 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


frost, war, suicide and effete races must be reck- 
oned calculable parts of the system of the world. 

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of 
the terms by which our life is walled up, and which 
show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom 
or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events. 

The force with which we resist these torrents of 
tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate that it 
amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest 
made by a minority of one, under compulsion of 
millions. I seemed in the height of a tempest to 
see men overboard struggling in the waves, and 
driven about here and there. They glanced intel- 
ligently at each other, but ’t was little they could do 
for one another ; ’t was much if each could keep 
afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye- 
beams, and all the rest was Fate. 

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping- 
out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. 
No picture of life can have any veracity that does 
not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is 
hooped in by a necessity which, by many experi- 
ments, he touches on every side until he learns its 
arc. 

The element running through entire nature, 
which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as 
limitation. Whatever limits us we call Fate. If 


FATE. 


25 


we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute 
and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks 
become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the 
antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo 
fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascend- 
ing changes, from insect and crawfish up to ele- 
phant ; whatever form she took, he took the male 
form of that kind, until she became at last woman 
and goddess, and he a man and a god. The lim- 
itations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of 
necessity is always perched at the top. 

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable 
to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight 
of mountains, — the one he snapped and the other 
he spurned with his heel, — they put round his foot 
a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this 
held him ; the more he spurned it the stiffer it 
drew. So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. 
Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, 
nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can 
get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the 
high sense in which the poets use it, even thought 
itself is not above Fate ; that too must act accord- 
ing to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fan- 
tastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental 
essence. 

And last of all, high over thought, in the world 
of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the 


26 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, 
and always striking soon or late when justice is 
not done. What is useful will last ; what is hurt- 
ful will sink. “The doer must suffer,” said the 
Greeks ; “ you would soothe a Deity not to be 
soothed.” “ God himself cannot procure good for 
the wicked,” said the Welsh triad. “ God may 
consent, but only for a time,” said the bard of 
Spain. The limitation is impassable by any in- 
sight of man. In its last and loftiest ascensions, 
insight itself and the freedom of the will is one 
of its obedient members. But we must not run 
into generalizations too large, but show the nat- 
ural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to 
do justice to the other elements as well. 

Thus we trace Fate in matter, mind, and morals; 
in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought 
and character as well. It is everywhere bound or 
limitation. But Fate has its lord ; limitation its 
limits, — is different seen from above and from 
below, from within and from without. For though 
Fate is immense, so is Power, which is the other 
fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows 
and limits Power, Power attends and antagonizes 
Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, 
but there is more than natural history. For who 
and what is this criticism that pries into the mat* 


FATE. 


27 


ter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, 
belly and members, link in a chain, nor any igno- 
minious baggage ; but a stupendous antagonism, a 
dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He 
betrays his relation to what is below him, — thick- 
skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous, quad- 
ruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, — 
and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of 
the old ones. But the lightning which explodes 
and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is 
in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone 
and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and 
shore ; and on the other part thought, the spirit 
which composes and decomposes nature, — here 
they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and 
matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, rid- 
ing peacefully together in the eye and brain of 
every man. 

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the 
contradiction, — freedom is necessary. If you 
please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and 
say, Fate is all ; then we say, a part of Fate is the 
freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse 
of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect an- 
nuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. 
And though nothing is more disgusting than the 
crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, 
and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some 


28 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


paper preamble like a “ Declaration of Indepen- 
dence ” or tlie statute right to vote, by those 
who have never dared to think or to act, — yet it is 
wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the 
other way: the practical view is the other. His 
sound relation to these facts is to use and command, 
not to cringe to them. “ Look not on Nature, for 
her name is fatal,” said the oracle. The too much 
contemplation of these limits induces meanness. 
They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, 
&c., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite 
the evils they fear. 

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud 
believers in Destiny. They conspire with it; a 
loving resignation is with the event. But the 
dogma makes a different impression when it is 
held by the weak and lazy. ’Tis weak and vi- 
cious people who cast the blame on Fate. The 
right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the 
loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except 
by themselves are the elements. So let man be. 
Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, 
and show his lordship by manners and deeds on 
the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose as 
with the tug of gravitation. No power, no per- 
suasion, no bribe shall make him give up his point. 
A man ought to compare advantageously with a 
river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not 


FATE. 29 

less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of 
these. 

’T is the best use of Fate to teach a fatal cour- 
age. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in 
your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, 
or what danger lies in the way of duty, — knowing 
you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If 
you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it at 
least for your good. 

For if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part 
of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Uni- 
verse have these savage accidents, our atoms are 
as savage in resistance. We should be crushed 
by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air 
within the body. A tube made of a film of glass 
can resist the shock of the ocean if filled with the 
same water. If there be omnipotence in the 
stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil. 

1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and 
defence: there are also the noble creative forces. 
The revelation of Thought takes man out of servi- 
tude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, 
we were born and afterward we were born again, 
and many times. We have successive experiences 
so important that the new forgets the old, and 
hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heav- 
ens. The day of days, the great day of the feast 
of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to 


30 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the Unity in things, to thfe omnipresence of law s 
— sees that what is must be and ought to be, or is 
the best. This beatitude dips from on high down 
on us and we see. It is not in us so much as we 
are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe 
and live ; if not, we die. If the light come to our 
eyes, we see ; else not. And if truth come to our 
mind we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if 
we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers ; we 
speak for Nature ; we prophesy and divine. 

This insight throws us on the party and interest 
of the Universe, against all and sundry ; against 
ourselves as much as others. A man speaking 
from insight affirms of himself what is true of the 
mind : seeing its immortality, he says, I am immor- 
tal ; seeing its invincibility, he says, I am strong. 
It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the 
maker, not of what is made. All things are 
touched and changed by it. This uses and is not 
used. It distances those who share it from those 
who share it not. Those who share it not are 
flocks and herds. It dates from itself ; not from 
former men or better men, gospel, or constitution, 
or college, or custom. Where it shines, Nature is 
no longer intrusive, but all things make a musical 
or pictorial impression. The world of men show 
like a comedy without laughter : populations, inter- 
ests, government, history ; ’t is all toy figures in 3 


FATE. 


31 


toy "house. It does not ovei value particular truths. 
We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted 
from an intellectual man. But in his presence our 
own mind is roused to activity, and we forget very 
fast what he says, much more interested in the new 
play of our own thought than in any thought of 
his. ’T is the majesty into which we have suddenly 
mounted, the impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, 
the sphere of laws, that engage us. Once we were 
stepping a little this way and a little that way ; 
now we are as men in a balloon, and do not think 
so much of the point we have left, or the point we 
would make, as of the liberty and glory of the 
way. 

Just as much intellect as you add, so much or- 
ganic power. He who sees through the design, pre- 
sides over it, and must will that which must be. 
We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream 
will come to pass. Our thought, though it were 
only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to 
be separated from thought, and not to be separated 
from will. They must always have coexisted. It 
apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead, which 
refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or 
thine, but the will of all mind. It is poured into 
the souls of all men, as the soul itself which consti- 
tutes them men. I know not whether there be, as 
is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a 


82 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


permanent westerly current which carries with it 
all atoms which rise to that height, hut I see that 
when souls reach a certain clearness of perception 
they accept a knowledge and motive above selfish- 
ness. A breath of will blows eternally through 
the universe of souls in the direction of the Right 
and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects 
inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows 
the worlds into order and orbit. 

Thought dissolves the material universe by car- 
rying the mind up into a sphere where all is plas- 
tic. Of two men, each obeying his own thought, 
he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest 
character. Always one man more than another 
represents the will of Divine Providence to the 
period. 

2. If thought makes free,j>o does the moral sen- 
timent. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry re- 
fuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the 
perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall 
prevail ; that affection is essential to will. More- 
over, when a strong will appears, it usually results 
from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole 
energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. 
All great force is real and elemental. There is 
no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a 
pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown 
in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alarm 


FATE. 


83 * 

and Bonaparte must believe tliey rest on a truth, 
or their will can be bought or bent. There is a 
bribe possible for any finite will. But the pure 
sympathy with universal ends is an infinite force, 
and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had 
experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose 
but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from 
that heart is an oath from the Most High. I know 
not what the word sublime means, if it be not the 
intimations, in this infant, of a terrific force. A 
text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, 
are not arguments but sallies of freedom. One of 
these is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, 44 ’T is writ- 
ten on the gate of Heaven, 4 Woe unto him who suf- 
fers himself to be betrayed by Fate ! ’ ” Does the 
reading of history make us fatalists ? What cour- 
age does not the opposite opinion show ! A lit- 
tle whim of will to be free gallantly contending 
against the universe of chemistry. 

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. 
Perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes. 
As Voltaire said, ’t is the misfortune of worthy peo- 
ple that they are cowards ; 44 un des plus grands 
malheurs des honnetes gens dest qu'ils sont des 
laches.” There must be a fusion of these two to 
generate the energy of will. There can be no 
driving force except through the conversion of the 
man into his will, making him the will, and the 

VOL- vi. 3 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


‘ 84 

will Mm. And one may say boldly that no man 
lias a right perception of any truth who has not 
been reacted on by it so as to be ready to be its 
martyr. 

The one serious and formidable thing in nature 
is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and 
therefore the world wants saviours and religions. 
One way is right to go; the hero sees it, and 
moves on that aim, and has the world under Mm 
for root and support. He is to others as the world. 
His approbation is honor ; his dissent, infamy. The 
glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A 
personal influence towers up in memory only wor- 
thy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, 
gravitation, and the rest of Fate. 

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we 
know it is the meter of the growing man. We 
stand against Fate, as children stand up against the 
wall in their father’s house and notch their height 
from year to year. But when the boy grows to 
man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that 
wall and builds a new and bigger. ’Tis only a 
question of time. Every brave youth is in train- 
ing to ride and rule this dragon. His science is 
to make weapons and wings of these passions and 
retarding forces. Now whether, seeing these two 
things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe 


FATE. 


35 


in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two 
gods. They are under one dominion here in the 
house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in 
letters, in art, in love, in religion ; but in mechan- 
ics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in 
politics, they think they come under another ; and 
that it would be a practical blunder to transfer 
the method and way of working of one sphere into 
the other. What good, honest, generous men at 
home, will be wolves and foxes on ’Change! What 
pious men in the parlor will vote for what repro- 
bates at the polls ! To a certain point, they believe 
themselves the care of a Providence. But in a 
steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a 
malignant energy rules. 

But relation and connection are not somewhere 
and sometimes, but everywhere and always. The 
divine order does not stop where their sight stops. 
The friendly power works on the same rules in the 
next farm and the next planet. But where they 
have not experience they run against it and hurt 
themselves. Fate then is a name for facts not yet 
passed under the fire of thought ; for causes which 
are unpenetrated. 

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exter- 
minate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome 
force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water 
drowns ship and sailor like a grain of dust. But 


36 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which 
drowned it will be cloven by it and carry it like 
its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is 
inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes 
a man like a dew-drop. But learn to skate, and 
the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic 
motion. The cold will brace your limbs and brain 
to genius, and make you foremost men of time. 
Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, 
which nature cannot bear to lose, and after cooping 
it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives 
a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the 
bloods it shall absorb and domineer : and more 
than Mexicos, the secrets of water and steam, the 
spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the 
chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are await- 
ing you. 

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds 
that of war ; but right drainage destroys typhus. 
The plague in the sea-service, from scurvy is healed 
by lemon juice and other diets portable or procur- 
able; the depopulation by cholera and small-pox 
is ended by drainage and vaccination ; and every 
other pest is not less in the chain of cause and 
effect, and may be fought off. And whilst art 
draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some 
benefit from the vanquished enemy. The mis- 
chievous torrent is taught to drudge for man ; the 


FATE. 


37 


wild beasts he makes useful for food, or dress, or 
labor ; the chemic explosions are controlled like his 
watch. These are now the steeds on which he 
rides. Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, 
by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by 
electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt 
the eagle in his own element. There ’s nothing he 
will not make his carrier. 

Steam was till the other day the devil which we 
dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or 
brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, 
lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house 
away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and 
Fulton bethought themselves that where was power 
was not devil, but was God ; that it must be availed 
of, and not by any means let off and wasted. 
Could he lift pots and roofs and houses so handily ? 
He was the workman they were in search of. He 
could be used to lift away, chain and compel other 
devils far more reluctant and dangerous, namely 
cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resist- 
ance of water, machinery, and the labors of all 
men in the world; and time he shall lengthen, 
and shorten space. 

It has not fared much otherwise with higher 
kinds of steam. The opinion of the million was 
the terror of the world, and it was attempted either 
to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it 


38 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


over with strata of society, — a layer of soldiers, 
over that a layer of lords, and a king on the top ; 
with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and po- 
lice. But sometimes the religious principle would 
get in and burst the hoops and rive every mountain 
laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts of pol- 
itics, believing in unity, saw that it was a power, 
and by satisfying it (as justice satisfies every- 
body), through a different disposition of society, — 
grouping it on a level instead of piling it into a 
mountain, — they have contrived to make of this 
terror the most harmless and energetic form of a 
State. 

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. 
Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronounc- 
ing on his fortunes ? Who likes to believe that he 
has, hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the 
vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure 
to pull him down, — with what grandeur of hope 
and resolve he is fired, — into a selfish, huckster- 
ing, servile, dodging animal? A learned physi- 
cian tells us the fact is invariable with the Neapol- 
itan, that when mature he assumes the forms of 
the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little over- 
stated, — but may pass. 

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man 
must thank his defects, and stand in some terror 
of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so 


FATE. 


89 


largely on his forces as to lame him ; a defect pays 
him revenues on the other side. The sufferance 
which is the badge of the Jew, has made him, in 
these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If 
Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the mak- 
ing, if limitation is power that shall be, if calami- 
ties, oppositions, and weights are wings and means, 

— we are reconciled. 

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of 
the Universe can have any soundness which does 
not admit its ascending effort. The direction of 
the whole and of the parts is toward benefit, and 
in proportion to the health. Behind every individ- 
ual closes organization ; before him opens liberty, 

— the Better, the Best. The first and worse races 
are dead. The second and imperfect races are dy- 
ing out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In 
the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new 
perception, the love and praise he extorts from his 
fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into 
freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths 
and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, 
is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity 
is a spur and valuable hint ; and where his endeav- 
ors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. 
The whole circle of animal life, — tooth against 
tooth, devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain 
and a grunt of triumph, until at last the whole me- 


40 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


nagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and 
refined for higher use, — pleases at a sufficient per- 
spective. 

But to see how fate slides into freedom and free- 
dom into fate, observe how far the roots of every 
creature run, or find if you can a point where there 
is no thread of connection. Our life is consenta- 
neous and far-related. This knot of nature is so 
well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to 
find the two ends. Nature is intricate, over-lapped, 
interweaved and endless. Christopher Wren said 
of the beautiful King’s College chapel, that “ if 
anybody would tell him where to lay the first stone, 
he would build such another.” But where shall 
we find the first atom in this house of man, which 
is all consent, inosculation, and balance of parts ? 

The web of relation is shown in habitat , shown 
in hibernation. When hibernation was observed, 
it was found that whilst some animals became tor- 
pid in winter, others were torpid in summer : hiber- 
nation then was a false name. The long sleep is 
not an effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply 
of food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid 
when the fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, 
and regains its activity when its food is ready. 

Eyes are found in light ; ears in auricular air ; 
feet on land ; fins in water ; wings in air ; and each 
creature where it was meant to be, with a mutual 


FATE. 


41 


fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna . There 
is adjustment between the animal and its food, its 
parasite, its enemy. Balances are kept. It is not 
allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. 
The like adjustments exist for man. His food is 
cooked when he arrives ; his coal in the pit ; the 
house ventilated ; the mud of the deluge dried ; his 
companions arrived at the same hour, and awaiting 
him with love, concert, laughter and tears. These 
are coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not 
less. There are more belongings to every creature 
than his air and his food. His instincts must be 
met, and he has predisposing power that bends and 
fits what is near him to his use. He is not possi- 
ble until the invisible things are right for him, as 
well as the visible. Of what changes then in sky 
and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does the 
appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise 
us ! 

How is this effected ? Nature is no spendthrift, 
but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the 
general says to his soldiers, “ If you want a fort, 
build a fort,” so nature makes every creature do its 
own work and get its living, — is it planet, animal 
or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal cell 
makes itself ; — then, what it wants. Every crea- 
ture, wren or dragon, shall make its own lair. As 
soon as there is life, there is self-direction and ab- 


42 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


sorbing and using of material. Life is freedom, — • 
life in the direct ratio of its amount. You may be 
sure the new-born man is not inert. Life works 
both voluntarily and supernaturally in its neighbor- 
hood. Do you suppose he can be estimated by his 
weight in pounds, or that he is contained in his 
skin, — this reaching, radiating, jaculating fellow ? 
The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and 
the papillae of a man run out to every star. 

When there is something to be done, the world 
knows how to get it done. The vegetable eye 
makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the 
need is ; the first cell converts itself into stomach, 
mouth, nose, or nail, according to the want ; the 
world throws its life into a hero or a shepherd, and 
puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Colum- 
bus were Italians, in their time; they would be 
Russians or Americans to-day. Things ripen, new 
men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The 
ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself, the corre- 
lation by which planets subside and crystallize, 
then animate beasts and men, — will not stop but 
will work into finer particulars, and from finer to 
finest. 

The secret of the world is the tie between person 
and event. Person makes event, and event person. 
The “ times,” “ the age,” what is that but a few 
profound persons and a few active persons who 


FATE. 


43 

epitomize the times? — Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, 
Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, 
Rothschild, Astor, Brunei, and the rest. The same 
fitness must be presumed between a man and the 
time and event, as between the sexes, or between a 
race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior 
races it uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the 
copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event 
that shall befall it ; for the event is only the actual- 
ization of its thoughts, and what we pray to our- 
selves for is always granted. The event is the print 
of your form. It fits you like your skin. What 
each does is proper to him. Events are the children 
of his body and mind. We learn that the soul of 
Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings, — 

" Alas ! till now I had not known, 

My guide and fortune’s guide are one.” 

All the toys that infatuate men and which they 
play for, — houses, land, money, luxury, power, 
fame, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or 
two of illusion overlaid. And of all the drums 
and rattles by which men are made willing to have 
their heads broke, and are led out solemnly every 
morning to parade, — the most admirable is this 
by which we are brought to believe that events are 
arbitrary and independent of actions. At the con- 
juror’s, we detect the hair by which he moves his 


44 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


puppet, but we have not eyes sharp enough to de- 
scry the thread that ties cause and effect. 

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, 
by making these the fruit of his character. Ducks 
take to the water, eagles to the sky, waders to the 
sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to counting- 
rooms, soldiers to the frontier. Thus events grow 
on the same stem with persons ; are sub-persons. 
The pleasure of life is according to the man that 
lives it, and not according to the work or the place. 
Life is an ecstasy. We know what madness be- 
longs to love, — what power to paint a vile object 
in hues of heaven. As insane persons are indiffer- 
ent to their dress, diet, and other accommodations, 
and as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most 
absurd acts, so a drop more of wine in our cup of 
life will reconcile us to strange company and work. 
Each creature puts forth from itself its own con- 
dition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy 
house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on 
the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its 
shell. In youth we clothe ourselves with rainbows 
and go as brave as the zodiac. In age we put out 
another sort of perspiration, — gout, fever, rheuma- 
tism, caprice, doubt, fretting and avarice. 

A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. 
A man’s friends are his magnetisms. We go to 
Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate ; but 


FATE. 


45 


we are examples. “ Quisque suos patimur manes” 
The tendency of every man to enact all that is in 
his constitution is expressed in the old belief that 
the efforts which we make to escape from our des- 
tiny only serve to lead us into it: and I have no- 
ticed a man likes better to be complimented on his 
position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, 
than on his merits. 

A man will see his character emitted in the 
events that seem to meet, but which exude from 
and accompany him. Events expand with the char- 
acter. As once he found himself among toys, so 
now he plays a part in colossal systems, and his 
growth is declared in his ambition, his companions 
and his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, 
but is a piece of causation ; the mosaic, angulated 
and ground to fit into the gap he fills. Hence in 
each town there is some man who is, in his brain 
and performance, an explanation of the tillage, pro- 
duction, factories, banks, churches, ways of living 
and society of that town. If you do not chance to 
meet him, all that you see will leave you a little 
puzzled; if you see him it will become plain. We 
know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who 
built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, 
Holyoke, Portland, and many another noisy mart. 
Each of these men, if they were transparent, would 
seem to you not so much men as walking cities, and 
wherever you put them they would build one. 


46 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


History is the action and reaction of these two, 
— Nature and Thought ; two boys pushing each 
other on the curbstone of the pavement. Every- 
thing is pusher or pushed; and matter and mind 
are in perpetual tilt and balance, so. Whilst the 
man is weak, the earth takes up him. He plants 
his brain and affections. By and by he will take 
up the earth, and have his gardens and vineyards 
in the beautiful order and productiveness of his 
thought. Every solid in the universe is ready to 
become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the 
power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If 
the wall remain adamant, it accuses the want of 
thought. To a subtler force it will stream into 
new forms, expressive of the character of the mind. 
What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggre- 
gate of incongruous materials which have obeyed 
the will of some man ? The granite was reluctant, 
but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was 
deep in the ground and well combined with stone, 
but could not hide from his fires. Wood, lime, 
stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth 
and sea, in vain. Here they are, within reach of 
every man’s day-labor, — what he wants of them. 
The whole world is the flux of matter over the 
wires of thought to the poles or points where it 
would build. The races of men rise out of the 
ground preoccupied with a thought which rules 


FATE. 


47 


them, and divided into parties ready armed and 
angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction. 
The quality of the thought differences the Egyp- 
tian and the Roman, the Austrian and the Amer- 
ican. The men who come on the stage at one 
period are all found to be related to each other. 
Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impres- 
sionable, for we are made of them ; all impression- 
able, but some more than others, and these first ex- 
press them. This explains the curious contempora- 
neousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth 
is in the air, and the most impressionable brain 
will announce it first, but all will announce it a few 
minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are 
the best index of the coming hour. So the great 
man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of 
the time, is the impressionable man ; — of a fibre 
irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels 
the infinitesimal attractions. His mind is righter 
than others because he yields to a current so feeble 
as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised. 

The correlation is shown in defects. Moller, in 
his Essay on Architecture, taught that the build- 
ing which was fitted accurately to answer its end 
would turn out to be beautiful though beauty had 
not been intended. I find the like unity in human 
structures rather virulent and pervasive; that a 
crudity in the blood will appear in the argument ; 


48 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech 
and handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the 
hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in 
his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his 
poem, into the structure of his fable, into his spec- 
ulation, into his charity. And as every man is 
hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own dis- 
ease, this checks all his activity. 

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. 
A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truc- 
ulent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret 
my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, 
knife-worms ; a swindler ate him first, then a cli- 
ent, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentle- 
men, bitter and selfish as Moloch. 

This correlation really existing can be divined. 
If the threads are there, thought can follow and 
show them. Especially when a soul is quick and 
docile, as Chaucer sings ; — 

“ Or if the soul of proper kind 
Be so perfect as men find, 

That it wot what is to come, 

And that he warneth all and some 
Of every of their aventures. 

By previsions or figures ; 

But that our flesh hath not might 
It to understand aright 
For it is warned too darkly.” 

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, 


FATE. 


49 


omen, periodicity, and presage : they meet the per- 
son they seek ; what their companion prepares to 
say to them, they first say to him ; and a hundred 
signs apprise them of what is about to befall. 

W onderful intricacy in the web, wonderful con- 
stancy in the design this vagabond life admits. 
We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet 
year after year, we find two men, two women, 
without legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of 
their best time within a few feet of each other. 
And the moral is that what we seek we shall find ; 
what we flee from flees from us ; as Goethe said, 
“ what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us 
in old age,” too often cursed with the granting of 
our prayer : and hence the high caution, that since 
we are sure cf having what we wish, we beware to 
ask only for high things. 

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human 
condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, 
freedom, and foreknowledge, exists ; the propound- 
ing, namely, of the double consciousness. A man 
must ride alternately on the horses of his private 
and his public nature, as the equestrians in the 
circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to 
horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and 
the other foot on the back of the other. So when 
a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his 
loins and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a 

VOL. VI. 4 


50 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


club in his wit ; a sour face and a selfish temper ; 
a strut in his gait and a conceit in his affection ; 
or is ground to powder by the vice of his race ; — - 
he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, 
which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who 
suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who se- 
cures universal benefit by his pain. 

To offset the drag of temperament and race, 
which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely that 
by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which 
is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes 
you draws in with it the divinity, in some form, 
to repay. A good intention clothes itself with 
sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any 
chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet 
and serve him for a horse. 

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which 
holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and com- 
pels every atom to serve an universal end. I do 
not wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer land- 
scape, or the glory of the stars ; but at the necessity 
of beauty under which the universe lies ; that all 
is and must be pictorial ; that the rainbow and the 
curve of the horizon and the arch of the blue vault 
are only results from the organism of the eye. 
There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me 
to admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, 
or a waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing 


FATE. 


51 


splendor and grace. How idle to choose a random 
sparkle here or there, when the indwelling neces- 
sity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, 
and discloses the central intention of Nature to be 
harmony and joy. 

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. 
If we thought men were free in the sense that in a 
single exception one fantastical will could prevail 
over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s 
hand could pull down the sun. If in the least par- 
ticular one could derange the order of nature, — 
who would accept the gift of life ? 

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, 
which secures that all is made of one piece ; that 
plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal 
and planet, food and eater are of one kind. In as- 
tronomy is vast space but no foreign system ; in 
geology, vast time but the same laws as to-day. 
Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no 
other than “ philosophy and theology embodied ” ? 
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage ele- 
ments, we who are made up of the same elements ? 
Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes 
man brave in believing that he cannot shun a dan- 
ger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not ; to 
the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him 
to the perception that there are no contingencies ; 
that Law rules throughout existence ; a Law which 


52 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


is not intelligent but intelligence ; — not personal 
nor impersonal — it disdains words and passes un- 
derstanding ; it dissolves persons ; it vivifies nature ; 
yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its om- 
nipotence. 


II. 


POWER. 

— « — 

His tongue was framed to music, 
And his hand was armed with skill 
His face was the mould of beauty, 
And his heart the throne of will. 





POWER. 


There is not yet any inventory of a man’s fac- 
ulties, any more than a bible of his opinions. Who 
shall set a limit to the influence of a human being ? 
There are men who by their sympathetic attrac- 
tions carry nations with them and lead the activity 
of the human race. And if there be such a tie 
that wherever the mind of man goes, nature will 
accompany him, perhaps there are men whose mag- 
netisms are of that force to draw material and ele- 
mental powers, and, where they appear, immense 
instrumentalities organize around them. Life is a 
search after power ; and this is an element with 
which the world is so saturated, — there is no chink 
or crevice in which it is not lodged, — that no hon- 
est seeking goes unrewarded. A man should prize 
events and possessions as the ore in which this fine 
mineral is found ; and he can well afford to let 
events and possessions and the breath of the body 
go, if their value has been added to him in the 
shape of power. If he have secured the elixir, he 
can spare the wide gardens from which it was dis- 
tilled. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold 
to perform, is the end to which Nature works, and 


V 


56 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the education of the will is the flowering and re* 
suit of all this geology and astronomy. 

All successful men have agreed in one thing, — 
they were causationists. They believed that things 
went not by luck, but by law ; that there was not 
a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins 
the first and last of things. A belief in causality, 
or strict connection between every pulse-beat and 
the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief 
in compensation, or that nothing is got for nothing, 
— characterizes all valuable minds, and must con- 
trol every effort that is made by an industrious 
one. The most valiant men are the best believers 
in the tension of the laws. “ All the great cap- 
tains,” said Bonaparte, “ have performed vast 
achievements by conforming with the rules of the 
art, — by adjusting efforts to obstacles.” 

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the 
other, as the young orators describe; the key to 
all ages is — Imbecility ; imbecility in the vast 
majority of men at all times, and even in heroes 
in all but certain eminent moments; victims of 
gravity, custom, and fear. This gives force to the 
strong, — that the multitude have no habit of self- 
reliance or original action. 

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. 
Courage, the old physicians taught (and their 
meaning holds, if their physiology is a little myth- 


POWER. 


57 


ical), — courage, or the degree of life, is as the 
degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries. 
“ During passion, anger, fury, trials of strength, 
wrestling, fighting, a large amount of blood is col- 
lected in the arteries, the maintenance of bodily 
strength requiring it, and but little is sent into the 
veins. This condition is constant with intrepid 
persons.” Where the arteries hold their blood, is 
courage and adventure possible. Where they pour 
it unrestrained into the veins, the spirit is low and 
feeble. For performance of great mark, it needs 
extraordinary health. If Eric is in robust health, 
and has slept well, and is at the top of his condi- 
tion, and thirty years old, at his departure from 
Greenland he will steer west, and his ships will 
reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric and put 
in a stronger and bolder man, — Biorn, or Tliorfin, 
— and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail 
six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles 
further, and reach Labrador and New England. 
There is no chance in results. With adults, as 
with children, one class enter cordially into the 
game and whirl with the whirling world ; the others 
have cold hands and remain bystanders ; or are 
only dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those 
who can carry a dead weight. The first wealth is 
health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve 
any one : it must husband its resources to live. But 


58 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

health or fulness answers its own ends and has to 
spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods 
and creeks of other men’s necessities. 

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature 
of the world. The mind that is parallel with the 
laws of nature will be in the current of events and 
strong with their strength. One man is made of 
the same stuff of which events are made ; is in 
sympathy with the course of things ; can predict it. 
Whatever befalls, befalls him first ; so that he is 
equal to whatever shall happen. A man who knows 
men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, war, re- 
ligion. For everywhere men are led in the same 
manners. 

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be sup- 
plied by any labor, art, or concert. It is like the 
climate, which easily rears a crop which no glass, 
or irrigation, or tillage, or manures can elsewhere 
rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New 
York or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy 
to force capital or genius or labor to it. They come 
of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, 
healthy, massive understanding seems to lie on the 
shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are 
covered with barks that night and day are drifted 
to this point. That is poured into its lap which 
other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody’s 
secret ; anticipates everybody’s discovery ; and if it 


POWER. 


59 


do not command every fact of the genius and the 
scholar, it is because it is large and sluggish, and 
does not think them worth the exertion which you 
do. 

This affirmative force is in one and is not in 
another, as one horse has the spring in him, and 
another in the whip. “ On the neck of the young 
man,” said Hafiz, “ sparkles no gem so gracious as 
enterprise. ” Import into any stationary district, 
as into an old Dutch population in New York or 
Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, 
a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, 
heads full of steam-hammer, pulley, crank, and 
toothed wheel, — and everything begins to shine 
with values. What enhancement to all the water 
and land in England is the arrival of James Watt 
or Brunei ! In every company there is not only 
the active and passive sex, but in both men and 
women a deeper and more important sex of mind , 
namely the inventive or creative class of both men 
and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. 
Each plus man represents his set, and if he have 
the accidental advantage of personal ascendency, — 
which implies neither more nor less of talent, but 
merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier 
or a schoolmaster (which one has, and one has not, 
as one has a black moustache and one a blonde), — • 
then quite easily and without envy or resistance all 


60 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


his coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to 
absorb them. The merchant works by book-keeper 
and cashier ; the lawyer’s authorities are hunted up 
by clerks ; the geologist reports the surveys of his 
subalterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the 
results of all the naturalists attached to the Expe- 
dition; Thorwaldsen’s statue is finished by stone- 
cutters ; Dumas has journeymen ; and Shakspeare 
was theatre-manager and used the labor of many 
young men, as ’well as the playbooks. 

There is always room for a man of force, and 
he makes room for many. Society is a troop of 
thinkers, and the best heads among them take the 
best places. A feeble man can see the farms that 
are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. 
The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. 
His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds 
clouds. 

When a new boy comes into school, when a 
man travels and encounters strangers every day, 
or when into any old club a new comer is do- 
mesticated, — that happens which befalls when a 
strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where 
cattle are kept ; there is at once a trial of strength 
between the best pair of horns and the new comer, 
and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. 
So now, there is a measuring of strength, very 
courteous but decisive, and an acquiescence thence- 


POWER. 


61 


forward when these two meet. Each reads his fate 
in the other’s eyes. The weaker party finds that 
none of his information or wit quite fits the occa- 
sion. He thought he knew this or that ; he finds 
that he omitted to learn the end of it. Nothing 
that he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all 
the rival’s arrows are good, and well thrown. But 
if he knew all the facts in the encyclopedia, it 
would not help him ; for this is an affair of pres- 
ence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb : the opponent 
has the sun and wind, and, in every cast, the choice 
of weapon and mark ; and when he himself is 
matched with some other antagonist, his own shafts 
fly well and hit. ’T is a question of stomach and 
constitution. The second man is as good as the 
first, — perhaps better ; but has not stoutness or 
stomach, as the first has, and so his wit seems over- 
fine or under-fine. 

, Health is good, — power, life, that resists dis- 
ease, poison, and all enemies, and is conservative 
as well as creative. Here is question, every spring, 
whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay ; 
whether to whitewash, or to potash, or to prune ; but 
the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree that 
agrees with the soil will grow in spite of blight, or 
bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in 
all weathers and all treatments. Vivacity, leader- 
ship, must be had, and we are not allowed to be 


62 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with 
dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we will 
make bread, we must have contagion, yeast, empty- 
ings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the 
dough; as the torpid artist seeks inspiration at any 
cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by 
prayer or by wine. And we have a certain instinct 
that where is great amount of life, though gross 
and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, 
and will be found at last in harmony with moral 
laws. 

We watch in children with pathetic interest the 
degree in which they possess recuperative force. 
When they are hurt by us, or by each other, or 
go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual 
prizes, or are beaten in the game, — if they lose 
heart and remember the mischance in their cham- 
ber at home, they have a serious check. But if 
they have the buoyancy and resistance that pre- 
occupies them with new interest in the new mo- 
ment, — the wounds cicatrize and the fibre is the 
tougher for the hurt. 

One comes to value this plus health when he 
sees that all difficulties vanish before it. A timid 
man, listening to the alarmists in Congress and in 
the newspapers, and observing the profligacy of 
party, — sectional interests urged with a fury which 
shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made 


POWER. 


63 


up to desperate extremities, ballot in one band and 
rifle in the other, — might easily believe that he 
and his country have seen their best days, and he 
hardens himself the best he can against the coming 
ruin. But after this has been foretold with equal 
confidence fifty times, and government six per cents 
have not declined a quarter of a mill, he discovers 
that the enormous elements of strength which are 
here in play make our politics unimportant. Per- 
sonal power, freedom, and the resources of nature 
strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper 
with such vigor that like thrifty trees, which grow 
in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not 
suffer from the profligate swarms that fatten on tha 
national treasury. The huge animals nourish huge 
parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the 
strength of the constitution. The same energy in 
the Greek Demos drew the remark that the evils 
of popular government appear greater than they 
are ; there is compensation for them in the spirit 
and energy it awakens. The rough-and-ready 
style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters, 
farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. Power 
educates the potentate. As long as our people quote 
English standards they dwarf their own propor- 
tions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me 
he wished it were a penal offence to bring an Eng- 
lish law-book into a court in this country, so perni- 


64 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


cious had he found in his experience our deference 
to English precedent. The very word 4 commerce ’ 
has only an English meaning, and is pinched to the 
cramp exigencies of English experience. The com- 
merce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who 
knows hut the commerce of air-balloons, must add 
an American extension to the pond-hole of admiral- 
ty. As long as our people quote English stand- 
ards they will miss the sovereignty of power ; but 
let these rough riders — legislators in shirt-sleeves, 
Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger, or whatever 
hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half 
orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and 
cupidity at Washington, — let these drive as they 
may, and the disposition of territories and public 
lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping at 
bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and 
of native millions, will bestow promptness, address, 
and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and 
authority and majesty of manners. The instinct 
of the people is right. Men expect from good 
whigs put into office by the respectability of the 
country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, 
Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent mem- 
bers, than from some strong transgressor, like Jef- 
ferson or Jackson, who first conquers his own gov- 
ernment and then uses the same genius to conquer 
the foreigner. The senators who dissented from 


POWER. 65 

Mr. Polk’s Mexican war were not those who knew 
better, but those who from political position could 
afford it ; not W ebster, but Benton and Calhoun. 

This power to be sure is not clothed in satin. 
’T is the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and 
pirates ; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal. 
But it brings its own antidote ; and here is my 
point, — that all kinds of power usually emerge at 
the same time ; good energy and bad ; power of 
mind with physical health ; the ecstasies of devo- 
tion with the exasperations of debauchery. The 
same elements are always present, only sometimes 
these conspicuous, and sometimes those ; what was 
yesterday foreground, being to-day background ; — 
what was surface, playing now a not less effective 
part as basis. The longer the drought lasts the 
more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. 
The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly 
off is by so much augmented. And in morals, 
wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with 
great impulses have great resources, and return 
from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will 
be whigs ; whilst red republicanism in the father is 
a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant 
in the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, 
ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the chil- 
dren and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air 
into radicalism. 


VOL. VI. 


5 


66 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Those who have most of this coarse energy, — 
the 4 bruisers,’ who have run the gauntlet of caucus 
and tavern through the county or the state, — have 
their own vices, but they have the good-nature of 
strength and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, 
they are usually frank and direct and above false- 
hood. Our politics fall into bad hands, and church- 
men and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are 
not fit persons to send to Congress. Politics is a 
deleterious profession, like some poisonous handi- 
crafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may 
be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose; 
and if it be only a question between the most civil 
and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These 
Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the 
snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a 
bold and manly cast. They see, against the unan- 
imous declarations of the people, how much crime 
the people will bear; they proceed from step to 
step, and they have calculated but too justly upon 
their Excellencies the New England governors, 
and upon their Honors the New England legisla- 
tors. The messages of the governors and the res- 
olutions of the legislatures are a proverb for 
expressing a sham virtuous indignation, which, in 
the course of events, is sure to be belied. 

In trade also this energy usually carries a trace, 
of ferocity. Philanthropic and religious bodies do 


POWER. 


67 


not commonly make their executive officers out 
of saints. The communities hitherto founded by 
socialists, — the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the 
American communities at New Harmony, at Brook 
Farm, at Zoar, are only possible by installing Ju- 
das as steward. The rest of the offices may be 
filled by good burgesses. The pious and charitable 
proprietor has a foreman not quite so pious and 
charitable. The most amiable of country gentle- 
men has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bull- 
dog which guards his orchard. Of the Shaker so- 
ciety it was formerly a sort of proverb in the coun- 
try that they always sent the devil to market. And 
in representations of the Deity, painting, poetry, 
and popular religion have ever drawn the wrath 
from Hell. It is an esoteric doctrine of society 
that a little wickedness is good to make muscle ; 
as if conscience were not good for hands and legs ; 
as if poor decayed formalists of law and order can- 
not run like wild goats, wolves, and conies ; that 
as there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the 
world cannot move without rogues ; that public 
spirit and the ready hand are as well found among 
the malignants. ’T is not very rare, the coinci- 
dence of sharp private and political practice with 
public spirit and good neighborhood. I knew a 
burly Boniface who for many years kept a public- 
house in one of our rural capitals. He was a 


68 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


knave whom the town could ill spare. He was 
a social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish. 
There was no crime which he did not or could not 
commit. But he made good friends of the select- 
men, served them with his best chop when they 
supped at his house, and also with his honor the 
Judge he was very cordial, grasping his hand. He 
introduced all the fiends, male and female, into 
the town, and united in his person the functions 
of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and bur- 
glar. He girdled the trees and cut off the horses’ 
tails of the temperance people, in the night. He 
led the ‘rummies’ and radicals in town-meeting 
with a speech. Meantime he was civil, fat, and 
easy, in his house, and precisely the most public- 
spirited citizen. He was active in getting the 
roads repaired and planted with shade-trees; he 
subscribed for the fountains, the gas, and the tele- 
graph ; he introduced the new horse-rake, the new 
scraper, the baby-jumper, and what not, that Con- 
necticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did 
this the easier that the peddler stopped at his 
house, and paid his keeping by setting up his new 
trap on the landlord’s premises. 

Whilst thus the energy for originating and exe- 
cuting work deforms itself by excess, and so our 
axe chops off our own fingers, — this evil is not 
without remedy. All the elements whose aid man 


POWER. 


69 


calls in will sometimes become his masters, espe- 
cially those of most subtle force. Shall he then 
renounce steam, fire, and electricity, or shall he 
learn to deal with them ? The rule for this whole 
class of agencies is, — all plus is good ; only put it 
in the right place. 

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot 
live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read 
novels and play whist ; cannot satisfy all their 
wants at the Thursday Lecture or the Boston 
Athenaeum. They pine for adventure, and must 
go to Pike’s Peak ; had rather die by the hatchet 
of a Pawnee than sit all day and every day at a 
counting-room desk. They are made for war, for 
the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing ; for 
hair-breadth adventures, huge risks, and the joy of 
eventful living. Some men cannot endure an hour 
of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook on 
board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind 
blew a gale, could not contain his joy ; “ Blow ! ” 
he cried, “me do tell you, blow ! ” Their friends 
and governors must see that some vent for their 
explosive complexion is provided. The roisters 
who are destined for infamy at home, if sent to 
Mexico will “cover you with glory,” and come 
back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, 
Californias, and Exploring Expeditions enough 
appertaining to America to find them in files to 


70 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


gnaw and in crocodiles to eat. The young English 
are fine animals, full of blood, and when they have 
no wars to breathe their riotous valors in, they 
seek for travels as dangerous as war, diving into 
Maelstroms ; swimming Hellesponts ; wading up the 
snowy Himmaleh; hunting lion, rhinoceros, ele- 
phant, in South Africa ; gypsying with Borrow in 
Spain and Algiers ; riding alligators in South 
America with Waterton ; utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, 
and Pacha, with Layard ; yachting among the ice- 
bergs of Lancaster Sound ; peeping into craters on 
the equator ; or running on the creases of Malays 
in Borneo. 

The excess of virility has the same importance 
in general history as in private and industrial life. 
Strong race or strong individual rests at last on 
natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, 
like the beasts around him, is still in reception of 
the milk from the teats of Nature. Cut off the 
connection between any of our works and this abor- 
iginal source, and the work is shallow. The peo- 
ple lean on this, and the mob is not quite so bad 
an argument as we sometimes say, for it has this 
good side. “ March without the people,” said a 
French deputy from the tribune, “ and you march 
into night : their instincts are a finger-pointing of 
Providence, always turned toward real benefit. 
But when you espouse an Orleans party, or a Bour« 


POWER. 


71 


bon or a Montalembert party, or any other but an 
organic party, though you mean well, you have a 
personality instead of a principle, which will inevit- 
ably drag you into a corner.” 

The best anecdotes of this force are to be had 
from savage life, in explorers, soldiers, and bucca- 
neers. But who cares for fallings-out of assassins 
and fights of bears or grindings of icebergs ? Phys- 
ical force has no value where there is nothing else. 
Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfata- 
ras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical coun- 
tries and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is 
to have a little on our hearth ; and of electricity, 
not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manage- 
able stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or 
energy ; the rests or remains of it in the civil and 
moral man are worth all the cannibals in the Pa- 
cific. 

In history the great moment is when the savage 
is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy 
Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of 
beauty : — and you have Pericles and Phidias, not 
yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. 
Everything good in nature and the world is in 
that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices 
still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrin- 
gency or acridity is got out by ethics and human- 
ity. 


72 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


The triumphs of peace have been in some prox* 
imity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar 
with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp 
were still visible in the port and complexion of the 
gentleman, his intellectual power culminated : the 
compression and tension of these stern conditions 
is a training for the finest and softest arts, and 
can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except 
by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations 
as hardy as war. 

W e say that success is constitutional ; depends 
on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of 
work, on courage ; that it is of main efficacy in car- 
rying on the world, and though rarely found in the 
right state for an article of commerce, but oftener 
in the supersaturate or excess which makes it dan- 
gerous and destructive, — yet it cannot be spared, 
and must be had in that form, and absorbents pro- 
vided *to take off its edge. 

The affirmative class monopolize the homage of 
mankind. They originate and execute all the 
great feats. What a force was coiled up in the 
skull of Napoleon ! Of the sixty thousand men 
making his army at Eylau, it seems some thirty 
thousand were thieves and burglars. The men 
whom in peaceful communities we hold if we can 
with iron at their legs, in prisons, under the mus- 
kets of sentinels, — this man dealt with hand to 


POWER. 73 

hand, dragged them to their duty, and won his vic- 
tories by their bayonets. 

This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure 
when it appears under conditions of supreme refine- 
ment, as in the proficients in high art. When Mi- 
chel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel 
in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went 
down into the Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, 
and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, 
mixed them with glue and water with his own 
hands, and having after many trials at last suited 
himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, 
week after week, month after month, the sibyls 
and prophets. He surpassed his successors in 
rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and 
refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture 
left unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw 
his figures first in skeleton, then to clothe them 
with flesh, and lastly to drape them. “ Ah ! ” said 
a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “ if 
a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed in- 
stead of working. There is no way to success in 
our art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and 
work like a digger on the railroad, all day and 
every day.” 

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus 
or positive power : an ounce of power must balance 
an ounce of weight. And though a man cannot 


74 CONDUCT OF LIFE . 

return into his mother’s womb and be born with 
new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two econo- 
mies which are the best succedanea which the case 
admits. The first is the stopping off decisively our 
miscellaneous activity and concentrating our force 
on one or a few points ; as the gardener, by severe 
pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two 
vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle 
into a sheaf of twigs. 

“ Enlarge not thy destiny, ” said the oracle, 
“ endeavor not to do more than is given thee in 
charge.” The one prudence in life is concentra- 
tion ; the one evil is dissipation ; and it makes no 
difference whether our dissipations are coarse or 
fine ; property and its cares, friends and a social 
habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Every 
thing is good which takes away one plaything and 
delusion more and drives us home to add one stroke 
of faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower 
duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, — all are distrac- 
tions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, 
and make a good poise and a straight course impos- 
sible. You must elect your work ; you shall take 
what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only 
so can that amount of vital force accumulate which 
can make the step from knowing to doing. No 
matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, 
the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. 


POWER. 


75 


*T is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into 
fruitfulness. Many an artist, lacking this, lacks 
all ; he sees the masculine Angelo or Cellini with 
despair. He too is up to Nature and the First 
Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect 
and swing his whole being into one act, he has not. 
The poet Campbell said that “ a man accustomed 
to work, was equal to any achievement he resolved 
on, and that for himself, necessity, not inspiration 
was the prompter of his muse.” 

Concentration is the secret of strength in poli- 
tics, in war, in trade, in short in all management 
of human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of 
the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry 
“how he had been able to achieve his discoveries?” 
— “ By always intending my mind.” Or if you 
will have a text from politics, take this from Plu- 
tarch ; “ There was, in the whole city, but one 
street in which Pericles was ever seen, the street 
which led to the market-place and the council 
house. He declined all invitations to banquets, 
and all gay assemblies and company. During the 
whole period of his administration he never dined 
at the table of a friend.” Or if we seek an exam- 
ple from trade, — “I hope,” said a good man to 
Rothschild, “your children are not too fond of 
money and business ; I am sure you would not 
wish that.” — “I am sure I should wish that ; I 


76 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and body to 
business, — that is the way to be happy. It re- 
quires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of 
caution to make a great fortune, and when you 
have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to 
keep it. If I were to listen to all the projects pro- 
posed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. Stick 
to one business, young man. Stick to your brew- 
ery (he said this to young Buxton), and you will 
be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and 
banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you 
will soon be in the Gazette.” 

Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive 
and tenacious, but they do not rush to a decision. 
But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made, 
— the best, if you can, but any is better than none. 
There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one 
is the shortest ; but set out at once on one. A 
man who has that presence of mind which can 
bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth 
for action a dozen men who know as much but can 
only bring it to light slowly. The good Speaker 
in the House is not the man who knows the theory 
of parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides 
off-hand. The good judge is not he who does hair- 
splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aim- 
ing at substantial justice, rules something intelligi- 
ble for the guidance of suitors. The good lawyer 


POWER. 


77 


is not the man who has an eye to every side and 
angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifi- 
cations, but who throws himself on your part so 
heartily that he can get you out of a scrape. Dr. 
J ohnson said, in one of his flowing sentences, “ Mis- 
erable beyond all names of wretchedness is that 
unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce before- 
hand to the principles of abstract reason all the de- 
tails of each domestic day. There are cases where 
little can be said, and much must be done.” 

The second substitute for temperament is drill, 
the power of use and routine. The hack is a better 
roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the 
galvanic stream, slow but continuous, is equal in 
power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, 
a better agent. So in human action, against the 
spasm of energy we offset the continuity of drill. 
We spread the same amount of force over much 
time, instead of condensing it into a moment. ’T is 
the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in 
a leaf. At West Point, Col. Buford, the chief en- 
gineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of 
a cannon until he broke them off. He fired a piece 
of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, 
until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trun- 
nion ? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece ? 
Every blast. ’‘'‘Diligence passe sens” Henry 
VIII. was wont to say, or great is drill. John 


78 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Kemble said that the worst provincial company 
of actors would go through a play better than the 
best amateur company. Basil. Hall likes to show 
that the worst regular troops will beat the best 
volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of 
mobs is good practice for orators. All the great 
speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it 
through England for seven years made Cobden a 
consummate debater. Stumping it through New 
England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips. 
The way to learn German is to read the same dozen 
pages over and over a hundred times, till you know 
every word and particle in them and can pro- 
nounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can 
recite a ballad at first reading so well as medioc- 
rity can at the fifteenth or twentieth reading. The 
rule for hospitality and Irish 4 help ’ is to have the 
same dinner every day throughout the year. At 
last, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a 
nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests 
are well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks 
that the reason why Nature is so perfect in her art, 
and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is that 
she has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the 
same thing so very often. Cannot one converse 
better on a topic on which he has experience, than 
on one which is new ? Men whose opinion is vak 
ued on ’Change are only such as have a special ex« 


POWER. 


79 


perience, and off tliat ground their opinion is not 
valuable. “More are made good by exercitation 
than by nature,” said Democritus. The friction in 
nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any 
power. It is not question to express our thought, 
to elect our way, but to overcome resistances of the 
medium and material in everything we do. Hence 
the use of drill, and the worthlessness of amateurs 
to cope with practitioners. Six hours every day at 
the piano, only to give facility of touch ; six hours 
a day at painting, only to give command of the 
odious materials, oil, ochres and brushes. The 
masters say that they know a master in music, only 
by seeing the pose of the hands on the keys ; — so 
difficult and vital an act is the command of the in- 
strument. To have learned the use of the tools, by 
thousands of manipulations ; to have learned the 
arts of reckoning, by endless adding and dividing, 
is the power of the mechanic and the clerk. 

I remarked in England, in confirmation of a fre- 
quent experience at home, that in literary circles, 
the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, 
editors, university deans and professors, bishops 
too, were by no means men of the largest literary 
talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intel- 
lectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and 
working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocri- 
ties tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative 


80 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


point or by working power, over multitudes of su- 
perior men, in Old as in New England. 

I have not forgotten that there are sublime con- 
siderations which limit the value of talent and su- 
perficial success. We can easily overpraise the 
vulgar hero. There are sources on which we have 
not drawn. I know what I abstain from. I ad- 
journ what I have to say on this topic to the chap- 
ters on Culture and Worship. But this force or 
spirit, being the means relied on by Nature for 
bringing the work of the day about, — as far as we 
attach importance to household life and the prizes 
of the world, we must respect that. And I hold 
that an economy may be applied to it ; it is as much 
a subject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and 
gases are ; it may be husbanded or wasted ; every 
man is efficient only as he is a container or vessel 
of this force, and never was any signal act or 
achievement in history but by this expenditure. 
This is not gold, but the gold-maker ; not the fame, 
but the exploit. 

If these forces and this husbandry are within 
reach of our will, and the laws of them can be read, 
we infer that all success and all conceivable bene- 
fit for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, 
and has its own sublime economies by which it may 
be attained. The world is mathematical, and has 
no casualty in all its vast and flowing curve. Sue- 


POWER. 


81 


cess has no more eccentricity than the gingham 
and muslin we weave in our mills. I know no 
more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New 
England brains, than to go into one of the facto- 
ries with which we have lined all the watercourses 
in the States. A man hardly knows how much he 
is a machine until he begins to make telegraph, 
loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image. 
But in these he is forced to leave out his follies 
and hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the 
machine is more moral than we. Let a man dare 
go to a loom and see if he be equal to it. Let 
machine confront machine, and see how they come 
out. The world-mill is more complex than the cal- 
ico-mill, and the architect stooped less. In the 
gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the 
web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is 
traced back to the girl that wove it, and lessens 
her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, 
rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning, 
Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your 
master and employer, in the web you weave ? A 
day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, 
the mechanism that makes it is infinitely eun- 
ninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy, fraud- 
ulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece ; 
nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, 
or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web. 


VOL. VI. 




III. 

WEALTH. 


Who shall tell what did befall, 

Far away in time, when once, 

Over the lifeless ball, 

Hung idle stars and suns ? 

What god the element obeyed ? 

Wings of what wind the lichen bore, 
Wafting the puny seeds of power, 
Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade ? 
And well the primal pioneer 
Knew the strong task to it assigned, 
Patient through Heaven’s enormous year 
To build in matter home for mind. 

From air the creeping centuries drew 
The matted thicket low and wide, 

This must the leaves of ages strew 
The granite slab to clothe and hide, 

Ere wheat can wave its golden pride. 
What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled 
(In dizzy aeons dim and mute 
The reeling brain can ill compute) 
Copper and iron, lead, and gold ? 

Wliat oldest star the fame can save 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Of races perishing to pave 
The planet with a floor of lime ? 

Dust is their pyramid and mole : 

Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed 
Under the tumbling mountain’s breast, 

In the safe herbal of the coal ? 

But when the quarried means were piled, 

All is waste and worthless, till 
Arrives the wise selecting will, 

And, out of slime and chaos, Wit 
Draws the threads of fair and fit. 

Then temples rose, and towns, and marts, 

The shop of toil, the hall of arts ; 

Then flew the sail across the seas 
To feed the North from tropic trees ; 

The storm-wind wove, the torrent span, 

Where they were bid the rivers ran ; 

New slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream, 

Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam. 

Then docks were built, and crops were stored, 
And ingots added to the hoard. 

But, though light-headed man forget, 
Remembering Matter pays her debt : 

Still, through her motes and masses, draw 
Electric thrills and ties of Law, 

Which bind the strengths of Nature wild 
To the conscience of a child. 


WEALTH. 


As soon as a stranger is introduced into any 
company, one of the first questions which all wish 
to have answered, is, How does that man get his 
living? And with reason. He is no whole man 
until he knows how to earn a blameless livelihood. 
Society is barbarous until every industrious man 
can get his living without dishonest customs. 

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a 
producer. He fails to make his place good in the 
world unless he not only pays his debt but also 
adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he 
do justice to his genius without making some larger 
demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He 
is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. 

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind 
to nature, from the rudest strokes of spade and axe 
up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist 
between thought and all production; because a 
better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute 
labor. The forces and the resistances are Nature’s, 
but the mind acts in bringing things from where 
they abound to where they are wanted; in wise 
combining ; in directing the practice of the useful 


86 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


arts, and in the creation of finer values by fine art, 
by eloquence, by song, or the reproductions of mem- 
ory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature ; 
and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, 
much less in saving, but in a better order, in time- 
liness, in being at the right spot. One man has 
stronger arms or longer legs ; another sees by the 
course of streams and growth of markets where 
land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, 
goes to sleep and wakes up rich. Steam is no 
stronger now than it was a hundred years ago ; 
but is put to better use. A clever fellow was 
acquainted with the expansive force of steam ; he 
also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting 
in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the 
steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam ! 
The steam puffs and expands as before, but this 
time it is dragging all Michigan at its back to 
hungry New York and hungry England. Coal lay 
in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a 
laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the sur- 
face. We may well call it black diamonds. Every 
basket is power and civilization. For coal is a port- 
able climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to 
Labrador and the polar circle ; and it is the means 
of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. 
Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of man- 
kind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will 


WEALTH. 


87 


draw two tons a mile , and coal carries coal, by rail 
and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta ; 
and with its comfort brings its industrial power. 

When the farmer’s peaches are taken from un- 
der the tree and carried into town, they have a new 
look and a hundredfold value over the fruit which 
grew on the same bough and lies fulsomely on the 
ground. The craft of the merchant is this bring- 
ing a thing from where it abounds to where it is 
costly. 

W ealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain 
and wind out ; in a good pump that yields you 
plenty of sweet water ; in two suits of clothes, so to 
change your dress when you are wet ; in dry sticks 
to burn, in a good double-wick lamp, and three 
meals ; in a horse or a locomotive to cross the land, 
in a boat to cross the sea ; in tools to work with, 
in books to read ; and so in giving on all sides by 
tools and auxiliaries the greatest possible exten- 
sion to our powers ; as if it added feet and hands 
and eyes and blood, length to the day, and knowl- 
edge and good-will. 

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. 
And here we must recite the iron law which Na- 
ture thunders in these northern climates. First 
she requires that each man should feed himself. If 
happily his fathers have left him no inheritance, he 
must go to work, and by making his wants less or 


88 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


his gains more, he must draw himself out of that 
state of pain and insult in which she forces the 
beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until this is 
done ; she starves, taunts, and torments him, takes 
away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends, and day- 
light, until he has fought his way to his own loaf. 
Then, less peremptorily but still with sting enough, 
she urges him to the acquisition of such things as 
belong to him. Every warehouse and shop-win- 
dow, every fruit-tree, every thought of every hour 
opens a new want to him which it concerns his 
power and dignity to gratify. It is of no use to 
argue the wants down : the philosophers have laid 
the greatness of man in making his wants few, 
but will a man content himself with a hut and a 
handful of dried pease ? He is born to be rich. 
He is thoroughly related ; and is tempted out by 
his appetites and fancies to the conquest of this 
and that piece of nature, until he finds his well- 
being in the use of his planet, and of more planets 
than his own. Wealth requires, besides the crust 
of bread and the roof, — the freedom of the city, 
the freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, the 
benefits of science, music and fine arts, the best 
culture and the best company. He is the rich man 
who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He 
is the richest man who knows how to draw a bene- 
fit from the labors of the greatest number of men, 


WEALTH. 


89 


of men in distant countries and in past times. The 
same correspondence that is between thirst in the 
stomach and water in the spring, exists between 
the whole of man and the whole of nature. The 
elements offer their service to him. The sea, wash- 
ing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous 
aid and the power and empire that follow it, — 
day by day to his craft and audacity. “ Beware of 
me,” it says, “ but if you can hold me, I am the 
key to all the lands.” Fire offers, on its side, 
an equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, 
ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin 
and gold ; forests of all woods ; fruits of all cli- 
mates ; animals of all habits ; the powers of tillage ; 
the fabrics of his chemic laboratory ; the webs of 
his loom ; the masculine draught of his locomotive, 
the talismans of the machine-shop ; all grand and 
subtile things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, 
war, trade, government, — are his natural play- 
mates, and according to the excellence of the ma- 
chinery in each human being is his attraction for 
the instruments he is to employ. The world is his 
tool-chest, and he is successful, or his education is 
carried on just so far, as is the marriage of his fac- 
ulties with nature, or the degree in which he takes 
up things into himself. 

The strong race is strong on these terms. The 
Saxons are the merchants of the world ; now, foi 


90 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


a thousand years, the leading race, and by nothing 
more than their quality of personal independence, 
and in its special modification, pecuniary indepen- 
dence. No reliance for bread and games on the 
government; no clanship, no patriarchal style of 
living by the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on, 
no system of clientship suits them ; but every man 
must pay his scot. The English are prosperous 
and peaceable, with their habit of considering that 
every man must take care of himself and has him- 
self to thank if he do not maintain and improve 
his position in society. 

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, 
inasmuch as it is a peremptory point of virtue that 
a man’s independence be secured. Poverty demor- 
alizes. A man in debt is so far a slave, and Wall 
street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man 
of his word, a man of honor, but that in failing 
circumstances no man can be relied on to keep his 
integrity. And when one observes in the hotels 
and palaces of our Atlantic capitals the habit of 
expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of 
bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of any kind, — he 
feels that when a man or a woman is driven to the 
wall, the chances of integrity are frightfully dimin- 
ished ; as if virtue were coming to be a luxury 
which few could afford, or, as Burke said, “ at a 
market almost too high for humanity.” He may 


WEALTH. 


91 


fix liis inventory of necessities and of enjoyments 
on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the 
power and privilege of thought, the chalking out 
his own career and having society on his own 
terms, he must bring his wants within his proper 
power to satisfy. 

The manly part is to do with might and main 
what you can do. The world is full of fops who 
never did anything and who have persuaded beau- 
ties and men of genius to wear their fop livery ; 
and these will deliver the fop opinion, that it is 
not respectable to be seen earning a living ; that it 
is much more respectable to spend without earn- 
ing ; and this doctrine of the snake will come also 
from the elect sons of light ; for wise men are not 
wise at all hours, and will speak five times from 
their taste or their humor, to once from their rea- 
son. The brave workman, who might betray his 
feeling of it in his manners if he do not succumb 
in his practice, must replace the grace or ele- 
gance forfeited, by the merit of the work done. 
No matter whether he makes shoes, or statues, or 
laws. It is the privilege of any human work 
which is well done to invest the doer with a cer- 
tain haughtiness. He can well afford not to con- 
ciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. 
The mechanic at his bench carries a quiet heart 
and assured manners, and deals on even terms 


92 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


with men of any condition. The artist has made 
his picture so true that it disconcerts criticism. 
The statue is so beautiful that it contracts no 
stain from the market, but makes the market a 
silent gallery for itself. The case of the young 
lawyer was pitiful to disgust, — a paltry matter 
of buttons or tweezer-cases ; but the determined 
youth saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous 
wedges, made the insignificance of the thing for- 
gotten, and gave fame by his sense and energy to 
the name and affairs of the Tittleton snuff-box 
factory. 

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is 
made a toy. The life of pleasure is so ostenta- 
tious that a shallow observer must believe that 
this is the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever 
is pretended, it ends in cosseting. But if this 
were the main use of surplus capital, it would 
bring us to barricades, burned towns and toma- 
hawks, presently. Men of sense esteem wealth to 
be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the 
converting of the sap and juices of the planet to 
the incarnation and nutriment of their design. 
Power is what they want, not candy ; — power to 
execute their design, power to give legs and feet, 
form and actuality to their thought ; which, to a 
clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the 
Universe exists, and all its resources might be well 


WEALTH. 


93 


applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a 
problem for practical navigation as well as for 
closet geometry, and looks on all kings and peo- 
ples as cowardly landsmen until they dare fit him 
out. Few men on the planet have more truly 
belonged to it. But he was forced to leave much 
of his map blank. His successors inherited his 
map, and inherited his fury to complete it. 

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map 
and survey, — the monomaniacs who talk up their 
project in marts and offices and entreat men to 
subscribe : — how did our factories get built ? how 
did North America get netted with iron rails, 
except by the importunity of these orators who 
dragged all the prudent men in? Is party the 
madness of many for the gain of a few ? This 
speculative genius is the madness of a few for the 
gain of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, 
but the public is the gainer. Each of these ideal- 
ists, working after his thought, would make it 
tyrannical, if he could. He is met and antagonized 
by other speculators as hot as he. The equilib- 
rium is preserved by these counteractions, as one 
tree keeps down another in the forest, that it may 
not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the 
supply in nature of railroad-presidents, copper- 
miners, grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-am 
nihilators, &c., is limited by the same law which 


94 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


keeps the proportion in the supply of carbon, of 
alum, and of hydrogen. 

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to 
the master-works and chief men of each race. It 
is to have the sea, by voyaging ; to visit the moun- 
tains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, 
Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arse- 
nals, manufactories. The reader of Humboldt’s 
“ Cosmos ” follows the marches of a man whose 
eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, 
arts, and implements which mankind have any- 
where accumulated, and who is using these to add 
to the stock. So it is with Denon, Beckford, Bel- 
zoni, Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, Lepsius and Liv- 
ingston. “ The rich man,” says Saadi, “ is every- 
where expected and at home.” The rich take 
up something more of the world into man’s life. 
They include the country as well as the town, the 
ocean-side, the White Hills, the Far West and the 
old European homesteads of man, in their notion 
of available material. The world is his who has 
money to go over it. He arrives at the sea-shore 
and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for 
him the stormy Atlantic, and made it a luxurious 
hotel, amid the horrors of tempests. The Persians 
say “ ’T is the same to him who wears a shoe, as 
if the whole earth were covered with leather.” 

Kings are said to have long arms, but every 


WEALTH. 


95 


man should have long arms, and should pluck his 
living, his instruments, his power and his know- 
ing, from the sun, moon, and stars. Is not then 
the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet I have 
never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man 
as rich as all men ought to be, or with an adequate 
command of nature. The pulpit and the press 
have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst 
for wealth ; but if men should take these moralists 
at their word and leave off aiming to be rich, the 
moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this 
love of power in the people, lest civilization should 
be undone. Men are urged by their ideas to ac- 
quire the command over nature. Ages derive a 
culture from the wealth of Roman Caesars, Leo 
Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes 
of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire, Townleys, Ver- 
nons and Peels, in England ; or whatever great 
proprietors. It is the interest of all men that 
there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of no- 
ble works of art; British Museums, and French 
Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Nat- 
ural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Con- 
gressional Libraries. It is the interest of all that 
there should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain 
Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses, Frank- 
lins, Richardsons and Kanes, to find the magnetic 
and the geographic poles. We are all richer for 


96 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the measurement of a degree of latitude on the 
earth’s surface. Our navigation is safer for the 
chart. How intimately our knowledge of the sys- 
tem of the Universe rests on that ! — and a true 
economy in a state or an individual will forget its 
frugality in behalf of claims like these. 

Whilst it is each man’s interest that not only 
ease and convenience of living, but also wealth or 
surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not 
be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to 
him. Goethe said well, “Nobody should be rich 
but those who understand it.” Some men are born 
to own, and can animate all their possessions. 
Others cannot : their owning is not graceful ; seems 
to be a compromise of their character ; they seem 
to steal their own dividends. They should own 
who can administer, not they who hoard and con- 
ceal ; not they who, the greater proprietors they 
are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose 
work carves out work for more, opens a path for 
all. For he is the rich man in whom the people 
are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the peo- 
ple are poor ; and how to give all access to the 
masterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of 
civilization. The socialism of our day has done 
good service in setting men on thinking how cer- 
tain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the op- 
ulent, can be enjoyed by all. For example, the 


WEALTH. 


9T 


providing to each man the means and apparatus of 
science and of the arts. There are many articles 
good for occasional use, which few men are able to 
own. Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, 
the satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars, the 
mountains and craters in the moon ; yet how few 
can buy a telescope ! and of those, scarcely one 
would like the trouble of keeping it in order and 
exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical appa- 
ratus, and many the like things. Every man may 
have occasion to consult books which he does not 
care to possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, 
tables, charts, maps, and public documents ; pic- 
tures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flow- 
ers, whose names he desires to know. 

There is a refining influence from the arts of 
Design on a prepared mind which is as positive as 
that of music, and not to be supplied from any 
other source. But pictures, engravings, statues and 
casts, beside their first cost, entail expenses, as of 
galleries and keepers for the exhibition ; and the 
use which any man can make of them- is rare, and 
their value too is much enhanced by the numbers 
of men who can share their enjoyment. In the 
Greek cities it was reckoned profane that any per- 
son should pretend a property in a work of art, 
which belonged to all who could behold it. I think 
sometimes, could I only have music on my own 

VOL. VI. 7 


98 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


terms ; could I live in a great city and know where 
I could go whenever I wished the ablution and in- 
undation of musical waves, — that were a bath and 
a medicine. 

If properties of this kind were owned by states, 
towns, and lyceums, they would draw the bonds 
of neighborhood closer. A town would exist to an 
intellectual purpose. In Europe, where the feudal 
forms secure the permanence of wealth in certain 
families, those families buy and preserve these 
things and lay them open to the public. But in 
America, where democratic institutions divide every 
estate into small portions after a few years, the 
public should step into the place of these proprie- 
tors, and provide this culture and inspiration for 
the citizen. 

Man was born to be rich, or inevitably grows 
rich by the use of his faculties ; by the union of 
thought with nature. Property is an intellectual 
production. The game requires coolness, right 
reasoning, promptness and patience in the players. 
Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infi- 
nite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have 
arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, 
and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, har- 
vestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, ex- 
changes, constitutes the worth of our world to-day. 

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man 


WEALTH. 


99 


cannot play, which few men can play well. The 
right merchant is one who has the just average of 
faculties we call common-sense ; a man of a strong 
affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on 
what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of 
the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, 
in the man , for his good or bad fortune, and so in 
making money. Men talk as if there were some 
magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts 
of life. He knows that all goes on the old road, 
pound for pound, cent for cent, — for every effect 
a perfect cause, — and that good luck is another 
name for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself 
in every transaction, and likes small and sure gains. 
Probity and closeness to the facts are the basis, but 
the masters of the art add a certain long arithme- 
tic. The problem is to combine many and remote 
operations with the accuracy and adherence to the 
facts which is easy in near and small transactions ; 
so to arrive at gigantic results, without any com- 
promise of safety. Napoleon was fond of telling 
the story of the Marseilles banker who said to his 
visitor, surprised at the contrast between the splen- 
dor of the banker’s chateau and hospitality and the 
meanness of the counting-room in which he had 
seen him, — “ Young man, you are too young to 
understand how masses are formed ; the true and 
only power, whether composed of money, water, or 


100 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


men ; it is all alike ; a mass is an immense cen- 
tre of motion, but it must be begun, it must be kept 
up : ” — and he might have added that the way in 
which it must be begun and kept up is by obedi- 
ence to the law of particles. 

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of 
the world, and since those laws are intellectual and 
moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. Polit- 
ical Economy is as good a book wherein to read 
the life of man and the ascendency of laws over all 
private and hostile influences, as any Bible which 
has come down to us. 

Money is representative, and follows the nature 
and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate 
meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The 
fanner is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. 
It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes 
of labor it represents. His bones ache with the 
days’ work that earned it. He knows how much 
land it represents ; — how much rain, frost, and 
sunshine. He knows that in the dollar he gives 
you so much discretion and patience, so much hoe- 
ing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar ; you 
must lift all that weight. In the city, where money 
follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in ex- 
change, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish 
the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only 
for real bread ; force for force. 


WEALTH. 


101 


The farmer’s dollar is heavy and the clerk’s is 
light and nimble ; leaps out of his pocket ; jumps 
on to cards and faro-tables : but still more curious 
is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is 
the finest barometer of social storms, and announces 
revolutions. 

Every step of civil advancement makes every 
man’s dollar worth more. In California, the coun- 
try where it grew, — what would it buy ? A few 
years since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hun- 
ger, bad company and crime. There are wide coun- 
tries, like Siberia, where it would buy little else to- 
day than some petty mitigation of suffering. In 
Rome it will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty 
years ago, a dollar would not buy much in Bos- 
ton. Now it will buy a great deal more in our 
old town, thanks to railroads, telegraphs, steamers, 
and the contemporaneous growth of New York 
and the whole country. Yet there are many goods 
appertaining to a capital city which are not yet 
purchasable here, no, not with a mountain of dol- 
lars. A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in 
Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but repre- 
sentative of value, and, at last, of moral values. A 
dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak 
strictly, not for the corn or house-room, but for 
Athenian corn, and Roman house-room, — for the 
wit, probity, and power which we eat bread and 


102 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

dwell in houses to share and exert. Wealth is 
mental ; wealth is moral. The value of a dollar is, 
to buy just things ; a dollar goes on increasing in 
value with all the genius and all the virtue of the 
world. A dollar in a university is worth more 
than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, 
law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, 
where dice, knives and arsenic are in constant play. 

The “Bank-Note Detector” is a useful publica- 
tion. But the current dollar, silver or paper, is 
itself the detector of the right and wrong where it 
circulates. Is it not instantly enhanced by the in- 
crease of equity ? If a trader refuses to sell his 
vote, or adheres to some odious right, he makes so 
much more equity in Massachusetts ; and every 
acre in the state is more worth, in the hour of his 
action. If you take out of State Street the ten 
honestest merchants and put in ten roguish persons 
controlling the same amount of capital, the rates 
of insurance will indicate it ; the soundness of 
banks will show it ; the highways will be less se- 
cure ; the schools will feel it, the children will 
bring home their little dose of the poison ; the 
judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his de- 
cisions be less upright ; ‘he has lost so much sup- 
port and constraint, which all need ; and the pul- 
pit will betray it, in a laxer rule of life. An apple- 
tree, if you take out every day for a number of 


WEALTH. 


103 


days a load of loam and put in a load of sand about 
its roots, will find it out. An apple-tree is a stu- 
pid kind of creature, but if this treatment be pur- 
sued for a short time I think it would begin to mis- 
trust something. And if you should take out of 
the powerful class engaged in trade a hundred good 
men and put in a hundred bad, or, what is just the 
same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, 
would not the dollar, which is not much stupider 
than an apple tree, presently find it out ? The 
value of a dollar is social, as it is created by soci- 
ety. Every man who removes into this city with 
any purchasable talent or skill in him, gives to 
every man’s labor in the city a new worth. If a 
talent is anywhere born into the world, the commu- 
nity of nations is enriched ; and much more with a 
new degree of probity. The expense of crime, one 
of the principal charges of every nation, is so far 
stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to increase 
or abate with the price of bread. If the Roths- 
childs at Paris do not accept bills, the people at 
Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham are forced 
into the highway, and landlords are shot down in 
Ireland. The police-records attest it. The vibra- 
tions are presently felt in New York, New Orleans, 
and Chicago. Not much otherwise the economical 
power touches the masses through the political 
lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and 


104 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


there is peace and the harvests are saved. He 
takes it, and there is war and an agitation through 
a large portion of mankind, with every hideous re- 
sult, ending in revolution and a new order. 

Wealth brings with it its own checks and bal- 
ances. The basis of political economy is non-inter- 
ference. The only safe rule is found in the self- 
adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not 
legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with 
your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties, make 
equal laws, secure life and property, and you need 
not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to 
talent and virtue and they will do themselves jus- 
tice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a 
free and just commonwealth, property rushes from 
the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and 
persevering. 

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy- 
battery exhibits the effects’ of electricity. The 
level of the sea is not more surely kept than is the 
equilibrium of value in society by the demand and 
supply ; and artifice or legislation punishes itself by 
reactions, gluts, and bankruptcies. The sublime 
laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies. 
Whoever knows what happens in the getting and 
spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of beer, that 
no wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints 
and penny loaves ; that, for all that is consumed so 


WEALTH. 


105 


much less remains in the basket and pot, hut what 
is gone out of these is not wasted but well spent if 
it nourish his body and enable him to finish his 
task ; — knows all of political economy that the 
budgets of empires can teach him. The interest of 
petty economy is this symbolization of the great 
economy ; the way in which a house and a private 
man’s methods tally with the solar system and the 
laws of give and take, throughout nature ; and how- 
ever wary we are of the falsehoods and petty tricks 
which we suicidally play off on each other, every 
man has a certain satisfaction whenever his dealing 
touches on the inevitable facts ; when he sees that 
things themselves dictate the price, as they always 
tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are seen to 
do. Your paper is not fine or coarse enough, — is 
too heavy, or too thin. The manufacturer says he 
will furnish you with just that thickness or thinness 
you want ; the pattern is quite indifferent to him ; 
here is his schedule ; — any variety of paper, as 
cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed. A 
pound of paper costs so much, and you may have it 
made up in any pattern you fancy. 

There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that 
supersedes chaffering. You will rent a house, but 
must have it cheap. The owner can reduce the 
rent, but so he incapacitates himself from making 
proper repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he 


106 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


would have, but a worse one ; besides that a rela* 
tion a little injurious is established between land- 
lord and tenant. You dismiss your laborer, saying, 
“ Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I cannot 
do without you.” Patrick goes off contented, for 
he knows that the weeds will grow with the pota- 
toes, the vines must be planted, next week, and 
however unwilling you may be, the cantelopes, 
crook-necks and cucumbers will send for him. Who 
but must wish that all labor and value should stand 
on the same simple and surly market ? If it is the 
best of its kind, it will. We must have joiner, 
locksmith, planter, priest, poet, doctor, cook, weaver, 
ostler ; each in turn, through the year. 

If a St. Michael’s pear sells for a shilling, it costs 
a shilling to raise it. If, in Boston, the best securi- 
ties offer twelve per cent, for money, they have just 
six per cent of insecurity. You may not see that the 
fine pear costs you a shilling, but it costs the com- 
munity so much. The shilling represents the num- 
ber of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk 
in ripening it. The price of coal shows the narrow- 
ness of the coal-field, and a compulsory confinement 
of the miners to a certain district. All salaries 
are reckoned on contingent as well as on actual 
services. “ If the wind were always southwest by 
west,” said the skipper, “ women might take ships 
to sea.” One might say that all things are of one 


WEALTH. 


107 


price ; that nothing is cheap or dear, and that the 
apparent disparities that strike us are only a shop- 
man’s trick of concealing the damage in your bar- 
gain. A youth coming into the city from his na- 
tive New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still 
fresh in his remembrance, boards at a first-class 
hotel, and believes he must somehow have out- 
witted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for luxuries are 
cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a 
better dinner, by the loss of some of the richest so- 
cial and educational advantages. He has lost what 
guards ! what incentives ! He will perhaps find 
by and by that he left the Muses at the door of the 
hotel, and found the Furies inside. Money often 
costs too much, and power and pleasure are not 
cheap. The ancient poet said “ The gods sell all 
things at a fair price.” 

There is an example of the compensations in the 
commercial history of this country. When the 
European wars threw the carrying -trade of the 
world, from 1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, 
a seizure was now and then made of an American 
ship. Of course the loss was serious to the owner, 
but the country was indemnified ; for we charged 
threepence a pound for carrying cotton, sixpence 
for tobacco, and so on ; which paid for the risk and 
loss, and brought into the country an immense pros- 
perity, early marriages, private wealth, the building 


108 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


of cities and of states : and after the war was over, 
we received compensation over and above, by treaty, 
for all the seizures. Well, the Americans grew rich 
and great. But the pay-day comes round. Brit- 
ain, France, and Germany, which our extraordinary 
profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the 
fame of our advantages, first their thousands then 
their millions of poor people, to share the crop. 
At first we employ them, and increase our pros- 
perity ; but, in the artificial system of society and 
of protected labor, which we also have adopted and 
enlarged, there come presently checks and stop- 
pages. Then we refuse to employ these poor men. 
But they will not so be answered. They go into 
the poor-rates, and though we refuse wages, we must 
now pay the same amount in the form of taxes. 
Again, it turns out that the largest proportion of 
crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of 
the crime and the expense of courts and of prisons 
we must bear, and the standing army of preventive 
police we must pay. The cost of education of the 
posterity of this great colony, I will not compute. 
But the gross amount of these costs will begin to 
pay back what we thought was a net gain from our 
transatlantic customers of 1800. It is vain to re- 
fuse this payment. We cannot get rid of these 
people, and we cannot get rid of their will to be 
supported. That has become an inevitable element 


WEALTH. 


109 


of our politics ; and, for their votes, each of the 
dominant parties courts and assists them to get it 
executed. Moreover, we have to pay, not what 
would have contented them at home, hut what they 
have learned to think necessary here ; so that opin- 
ion, fancy, and all manner of moral considerations 
complicate the problem. 

There are few measures of economy which will 
bear to be named without disgust ; for the subject 
is tender and we may easily have too much of it, 
and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of 
which our bodies are built up, — which, offensive in 
the particular, yet compose valuable and effective 
masses. Our nature and genius force us to respect 
ends, whilst we use means. We must use the 
means, and yet, in our most accurate using some- 
how screen and cloak them, as we can only give 
them any beauty by a reflection of the glory of the 
end. That is the good head, which serves the end 
and commands the means. The rabble are cor- 
rupted by their means ; the means are too strong 
for them, and they desert their end. 

1. The first of these measures is that each man’s 
expense must proceed from his character. As long 
as your genius buys, the investment is safe, though 
you spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man 
with some faculty which enables him to do easily 


110 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes 
him necessary to society. This native determina- 
tion guides his labor and his spending. He wants 
an equipment of means and tools proper to his tal- 
ent. And to save on this point were to neutralize 
the special strength and helpfulness of each mind. 
Do your work, respecting the excellence of the 
work, and not its acceptableness. This is so much 
economy that, rightly read, it is the sum of econ- 
omy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of 
time or chests of money, — but in spending them 
off the line of your career. The crime which bank- 
rupts men and states is job-work ; — declining from 
your main design, to serve a turn here or there. 
Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of 
your life ; nothing is great or desirable if it is off 
from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a 
straight line and say that society can never prosper 
but must always be bankrupt, until every man does 
that which he was created to do. 

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense 
which is not yours. Allston the painter was wont 
to say that he built a plain house, and filled it with 
plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe 
to any to visit him who had not similar tastes to 
his own. We are sympathetic, and, like children, 
want everything we see. But it is a large stride to 
independence, when a man, in the discovery of 


WEALTH. 


Ill 


his proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false 
expen ses. As the betrothed maiden by one secure 
affection is relieved from a system of slaveries, — 
the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all, — so 
the man who has found what he can do, can spend 
on that and leave all other spending. Montaigne 
said, “ When he was a younger brother, he went 
brave in dress and equipage, but afterward his 
chateau and farms might answer for him.” Let 
a man who belongs to the class of nobles, those 
namely who have found out that they can do some- 
thing, relieve himself of all vague squandering on 
objects not his. Let the realist not mind appear- 
ances. Let him delegate to others the costly cour- 
tesies and decorations of social life. The virtues 
are economists, but some of the vices are also. 
Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride 
is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I 
reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hun- 
dred a year. Pride is handsome, economical ; pride 
eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but 
itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to ex- 
change vanity for pride. Pride can go without 
domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house 
with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, 
lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, 
can talk with poor men, or sit silent well-contented 
in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, 


112 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


horses, men, women, health, and peace, and is still 
nothing at last ; a long way leading nowhere. Only 
one drawback ; proud people are intolerably selfish, 
and the vain are gentle and giving. 

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a 
genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or 
philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill pro- 
vider, and should be wise in season and not fetter 
himself with duties which will embitter his days 
and spoil him for his proper work. We had in 
this region, twenty years ago, among our educated 
men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate 
desire to go upon the land and unite farming to 
intellectual pursuits. Many effected their purpose 
and made the experiment, and some became down- 
right ploughmen ; but all were cured of their faith 
that scholarship and practical farming (I mean, 
with one’s own hands) could be united. 

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale 
scholar leaves his desk to draw a freer breath and 
get a juster statement of his thought, in the garden- 
walk. He stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock 
that is choking the j r oung corn, and finds there are 
two ; close behind the last is a third ; he reaches 
out his hand to a fourth, behind that are four thou- 
sand and one. He is heated and untuned, and by 
and by wakes up from his idiot dream of cliickweed 
and red-root, to remember his morning thought, and 


WEALTH. 


113 


to find that with his adamantine purposes he has 
been duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those 
pernicious machineries we read of every month in 
the newspapers, which catch a man’s coat-skirt or 
his hand and draw in his arm, his leg and his whole 
body to irresistible destruction. In an evil hour 
he pulled down his wall and added a field to his 
homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If 
a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him 
leave home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every 
hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge ; all 
he has done and all he means to do, stand in his 
way like duns, when he would go out of his gate. 
The devotion to these vines and trees he finds 
poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free 
his brain and serve his body. Long marches are no 
hardship to him. He believes he composes easily 
on the hills. But this pottering in a few square 
yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The 
smell of the plants has drugged him and robbed 
him of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. 
He grows peevish and poor-spirited. The genius 
of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like 
resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concen- 
trative in sparks and shocks ; the other is diffuse 
strength ; so that each disqualifies its workman for 
the other’s duties. 

An engraver, whose hands must be of an exqui- 

VOL. VI. 8 


114 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


site delicacy of stroke, should not lay stone walls. 
Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions for 
microscopic observation : “ Lie down on your back, 
and hold the single lens and object over your eye,” 
&e. &c. How much more the seeker of abstract 
truth, who needs periods of isolation and rapt con* 
centration and almost a going out of the body to 
think ! 

2. Spend after your genius, and by system. Na- 
ture goes by rule, not by sallies and saltations. 
There must be system in the economies. Saving 
and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic 
family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free 
spending safe. The secret of success lies never 
in the amount of money, but in the relation of in- 
come to outgo ; as, after expense has been fixed at 
a certain point, then new and steady rills of income 
though never so small being added, wealth begins. 
But in ordinary, as means increase, spending in- 
creases faster, so that large incomes, in England 
and elsewhere, are found not to help matters ; — 
the eating quality of debt does not relax its vorac- 
ity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the 
use of planting larger crops ? In England, the 
richest country in the universe, I was assured by 
shrewd observers that great lords and ladies had no 
more guineas to give away than other people ; that 
liberality with money is as rare and as immediately 


WEALTH. 


115 


famous a virtue as it is here. Want is a growing 
giant whom the coat of Have was never large 
enough to cover. I remember in Warwickshire to 
have been shown a fair manor, , still in the same 
name as in Shakspeare’s time. The rent-roll I was 
told is some fourteen thousand pounds a year ; but 
when the second son of the late proprietor was 
born, the father was perplexed how to provide for 
him. The eldest son must inherit the manor; what 
to do with this supernumerary ? He was advised 
to breed him for the Church and to settle him in 
the rectorship which was in the gift of the family ; 
which was done. It is a general rule in that coun- 
try that bigger incomes do not help anybody. It 
is commonly observed that a sudden wealth, like a 
prize drawn in a lottery or a large bequest to a 
poor family, does not permanently enrich. They 
have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and with 
the rapid wealth come rapid claims which they do 
not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly 
dissipated. 

A system must be in every economy, or the best 
single expedients are of no avail. A farm is a 
good thing when it begins and ends with itself, 
and does not need a salary or a shop to eke it out. 
Thus, the cattle are a main link in the chain-ring. 
If the non-conformist or aesthetic farmer leaves out 
the cattle and does not also leave out the want 


116 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


which the cattle must supply, he must fill the gap 
by begging or stealing. When men now alive 
were born, the farm yielded everything that was 
consmned on it. The farm yielded no money, and 
the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his 
neighbors came in to his aid ; each gave a day’s 
work, or a half day ; or lent his yoke of oxen, or 
his horse, and kept his work even ; hoed his pota- 
toes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye ; well knowing 
that no man could afford to hire labor without sell- 
ing his land. In autumn a farmer could sell an ox 
or a hog and get a little money to pay taxes withal. 
Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes, — 
tin- ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad- 
tickets and newspapers. 

A master in each art is required, because the 
practice is never with still or dead subjects, but 
they change in your hands. You think farm-build- 
ings and broad acres a solid property ; but its value 
is flowing like water. It requires as much watch- 
ing as if you were decanting wine from a cask. 
The farmer knows what to do with it, stops every 
leak, turns all the streamlets to one reservoir and 
decants wine ; but a blunderhead comes out of 
Cornhill, tries his hand, and it all leaks away. So 
is it with granite streets or timber townships as 
with fruit or flowers. Nor is any investment so 
permanent that it can be allowed to remain with- 


WEALTH. 


117 


out incessant watching, as the history of each at- 
tempt to lock up an inheritance through two gener- 
ations for an unborn inheritor may show. 

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the coun- 
try, and will keep his cow, he thinks a cow is a 
creature that is fed on hay and gives a pail of milk 
twice a day. But the cow that he buys gives milk 
for three months ; then her bag dries up. What 
to do with a dry cow ? who will buy her? Perhaps 
he bought also a yoke of oxen to do his work ; but 
they get blown and lame. What to do with blown 
and lame oxen ? The farmer fats his after the 
spring-work is done, and kills them in the fall. 
But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and 
leaves his cottage daily in the cars at business 
hours, be pothered with fatting and killing oxen ? 
He plants trees ; but there must be crops, to keep 
the trees in ploughed land. What shall be the 
crops ? He will have nothing to do with trees, but 
will have grass. After a year or two the grass 
must be turned up and ploughed ; now what crops ? 
Credulous Cockayne ! 

3. Help comes in the custom of the country, 
and the rule of Impera parendo. The rule is not 
to dictate nor to insist on carrying out each of your 
schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn practi- 
cally the secret spoken from all nature, that things 
themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show 


118 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


to the watchful their own law. Nobody need stir 
hand or foot. The custom of the country will do 
it all. I know not how to build or to plant ; nei- 
ther how to buy wood, nor what to do with the 
house-lot, the field, or the wood-lot, when bought. 
Never fear ; it is all settled how it shall be, long 
beforehand, in the custom of the country, — whether 
to sand or whether to clay it, when to plough, and 
how to dress, whether to grass or to corn ; and you 
cannot help or hinder it. Nature has her own best 
mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere 
told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears 
open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving 
us when we prefer our own way to hers. How 
often we must remember the art of the surgeon, 
which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself 
with releasing the parts from false position ; they 
fly into place by the action of the muscles. On 
this art of nature all our arts rely. 

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent con- 
struction of railways in England, Mr. Brunei went 
straight from terminus to terminus, through moun- 
tains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting du- 
cal estates in two, and shooting through this man’s 
cellar and that man’s attic window, and so arriving 
at his end, at great pleasure to geometers, but with 
cost to his company. Mr. Stephenson on the con- 
trary, believing that the river knows the way, fol 


WEALTH. 


119 


lowed Lis valley as implicitly as our Western Rail- 
road follows tlie Westfield River, and turned out 
to be the safest and cheapest engineer. We say 
the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse 
surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has 
frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the 
best path through the thicket and over the hil& ; 
and travellers and Indians know the value of a 
buffalo-trail, which is sure to be the easiest possible 
pass through the ridge. 

When a citizen fresh from Dock Square or Milk 
Street comes out and buys land in the country, his 
first thought is to a fine outlook from his windows ; 
his library must command a western view ; a sun- 
set every day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, 
Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and Unca- 
noonuc. What, thirty acres, and all this magnifi- 
cence for fifteen hundred dollars ! It would be 
cheap at fifty thousand. He proceeds at once, his 
eyes dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for his 
corner-stone. But the man who is to level the 
ground thinks it will take many hundred loads of 
gravel to fill the hollow to the road. The stone- 
mason who should build the well thinks he shall 
have to dig forty feet ; the baker doubts he shall 
never like to drive up to the door; the practical 
neighbor cavils at the position of the barn ; and 
the citizen comes to know that his predecessor the 


120 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


farmer built the liouse in the right spot for the sun 
and wind, the spring, and water-drainage, and the 
convenience to the pasture, the garden, the field 
and the road. So Dock Square yields the point, 
and things have their own way. Use has made the 
► farmer wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take 
his counsel. From step to step he comes at last to 
surrender at discretion. The farmer affects to take 
his orders ; but the citizen says, You .may ask me 
as often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, 
for an opinion concerning the mode of building my 
wall, or sinking my well, or laying out my acre, 
but the ball will rebound to you. These are mat- 
ters on which I neither know nor need to know 
anything. These are questions which you and not 
I shall answer. 

Not less within doors a system settles itself para- 
mount and tyrannical over master and mistress, 
servant and child, cousin and acquaintance. ’T is 
in vain that genius or virtue or energy of charac- 
ter strive and cry against it. This is fate. And 
’t is very well that the poor husband reads in a 
book of a new way of living, and resolves to adopt 
it at home ; let him go home and try it, if he dare. 

4. Another point of economy is to look for 
seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope 
to buy one kind with another kind. Friendship 
buys friendship ; justice, justice ; military merit, 


WEALTH. 


121 


military success. Good husbandry finds wife, chil- 
dren and household. The good merchant, large 
gains, ships, stocks, and money. The good poet, 
fame and literary credit ; but not either, the other. 
Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations 
on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, 
praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he 
does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong 
a good provider. The odd circumstance is that 
Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this 
improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with 
Furlong’s lands. 

I have not at all completed my design. But we 
must not leave the topic without casting one glance 
into the interior recesses. It is a doctrine of phi- 
losophy that man is a being of degrees ; that there 
is nothing in the world which is not repeated in 
his body, his body being a sort of miniature or 
summary of the world ; then that there is nothing 
in his body which is not repeated as in a celestial 
sphere in his mind ; then, there is nothing in his 
brain which is not repeated in a higher sphere in 
his moral system. 

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All 
things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is 
that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do 
must always have a higher aim. Thus it is a 
maxim that money is another kind of blood. Pe- 


122 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


cunia alter sanguis : or, the estate of a man is only 
a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen 
analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is no 
maxim of the merchant which does not admit of 
an extended sense, e. #., “ Best use of money is to 
pay debts ; ” “ Every business by itself ; ” “ Best 
time is present time ; ” “ The right investment is 
in tools of your trade ; ” and the like. The count- 
ing-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of 
the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse 
symbol of the soul’s economy. It is to spend for 
power and not for pleasure. It is to invest in- 
come ; that is to say to take up particulars into 
generals ; days into integral eras — literary, emo- 
tive, practical — of its life, and still to ascend in 
its investment. The merchant has but one rule, 
absorb and invest ; he is to be capitalist ; the 
scraps and filings must be gathered back into the 
crucible ; the gas and smoke must be burned, and 
earnings must not go to increase expense, but to 
capital again. Well, the man must be capitalist. 
Will he spend his income, or will he invest? His 
body and every organ is under the same law. His 
body is a jar in which the liquor of life is stored. 
Will he spend for pleasure ? The way to ruin is 
short and facile. Will he not spend but hoard for 
power? It passes through the sacred fermenta- 
tions, by that law of Nature whereby everything 


WEALTH. 


123 


climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor be- 
comes mental and moral vigor. The bread he 
eats is first strength and animal spirits ; it becomes, 
in higher laboratories, imagery and thought ; and 
in still higher results, courage’ and endurance. 
This is the right compound interest ; this is cap- 
ital doubled, quadrupled, centupled ; man raised 
to his highest power. 

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher 
plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, 
that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in 
augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man en- 
riched, in repeating the old experiments of ani- 
mal sensation ; nor unless through new powers and 
ascending pleasures he knows himself by the ac- 
tual experience of higher good to be already on 
the way to the highest. 




CULTURE. 


Can rules or tutors educate 
The semigod whom we await ? 

He must be musical, 

Tremulous, impressional, 

Alive to gentle influence 
Of landscape and of sky, 

And tender to the spirit-touch 
Of man’s or maiden’s eye : 

But, to his native centre fast, 

Shall into Future fuse the Past, 

And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould 
recast. 

















I 

























CULTURE. 


The word of ambition at the present day is Cul- 
ture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, 
and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects 
the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his 
power. A topical memory makes him an almanac ; 
a talent for debate, a disputant ; skill to get money 
makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture re- 
duces these inflammations by invoking the aid of 
other powers against the dominant talent, and by 
appealing to the rank of powers. It watches suc- 
cess. For performance, Nature has no mercy, and 
sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a 
dropsy or a tympany of him. If she wants a 
thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, 
and any excess of power in one part is usually paid 
for at once by some defect in a contiguous part. 

Our efficiency depends so much on our concen- 
tration, that Nature usually in the instances where 
a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him 
with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working 
power. It is said a man can write but one book ; 
and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its im- 
pression on all his performances. If she creates a 


128 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


policeman like Fouchd, lie is made up of suspicions 
and of plots to circumvent them. “ The air,” said 
Fouche, “ is full of poniards.” The physician 
Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weigh- 
ing his food. Lord Coke -valued Chaucer highly 
because the Canon Yeman’s Tale illustrates the 
statute fifth Hen. IV. Chap. 4, against alchemy. 
I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs 
in the English state were derived from the devotion 
to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, 
set out to explain to this country that the principal 
cause of the success of General Washington was 
the aid he derived from the freemasons. 

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature 
has secured individualism by giving the private 
person a high conceit of his weight in the system. 
The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and 
bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 
It is a disease that like influenza falls on all consti- 
tutions. In the distemper known to physicians as 
chorea , the patient sometimes turns round and con- 
tinues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a 
metaphysical variety of this malady? The man 
runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls 
into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the 
world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its 
annoying forms is a craving for sympathy. The 
sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from 


CULTURE. 


129 


their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that 
you may pity them. They like sickness, because 
physical pain will extort some show of interest 
from the bystanders, as we have seen children who 
finding themselves of no account when grown peo- 
ple come in, will cough till they choke, to draw at- 
tention. 

This distemper is the scourge of talent, — of ar- 
tists, inventors and philosophers. Eminent spir- 
itualists shall have an incapacity of putting their 
act or word aloof from them and seeing it bravely 
for the nothing it is. Beware of the man who says, 
“ I am on the eve of a revelation.” It is speedily 
punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to 
humor it, and, by treating the patient tenderly, to 
shut him up in a narrower selfism and exclude him 
from the great world of God’s cheerful fallible men 
and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst we 
are insultable. Religious literature has eminent 
examples, and if we run over our private list of 
poets, critics, philanthropists and philosophers, we 
shall find them infected with this dropsy and ele- 
phantiasis, which we ought to have tapped. 

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among nota- 
ble persons that we must infer some strong neces- 
sity in nature which it subserves ; such as we see in 
the sexual attraction. The preservation of the spe- 
cies was a point of such necessity that Nature has 

VOL. vi. 9 


130 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading 
the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and dis- 
order. So egotism has its root in the cardinal 
necessity by which each individual persists to be 
what he is. 

This individuality is not only not inconsistent 
with culture, but is the basis of it. Every valuable 
nature is there in its own right, and the student we 
speak to must have a motherwit invincible by his 
culture, — which uses all books, arts, facilities, and 
elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and 
lost in them. He only is a well-made man who has 
a good determination. And the end of culture is 
not to destroy this, God forbid ! but to train away 
all impediment and mixture and leave nothing but 
pure power. Our student must have a style and 
determination, and be a master in his own specialty. 
But having this, he must put it behind him. He 
must have a catholicity, a power to see with a free 
and disengaged look every object. Yet is this pri- 
vate interest and self so overcharged that if a man 
seeks a companion who can look at objects for their 
own sake and without affection or self-reference, he 
will find the fewest who will give him that satisfac- 
tion ; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, 
an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not con- 
nect with their self-love. Though they talk of the 
object before them, they are thinking of themselves, 


CULTURE. 131 

and their vanity is laying little traps for your ad- 
miration. 

But after a man has discovered that there are 
limits to the interest which his private history has 
for mankind, he still converses with his family, or 
a few companions, — perhaps with half a dozen per- 
sonalities that are famous in his neighborhood. In 
Boston the question of life is the names of some 
eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, 
Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. 
Greenough ? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, 
Father Taylor, Theodore Parker ? Have you 
talked with Messieurs Turbine wheel, Summitlevel, 
and Lacofrupees ? Then you may as well die. In 
New York the question is of some other eight, or 
ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, 
merchants and brokers, — two or three scholars, 
two or three capitalists, two or three editors of 
newspapers ? New York is a sucked orange. All 
conversation is at an end when we have discharged 
ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or im- 
ported, which make up our American existence. 
Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a faint 
copy of these heroes. 

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company 
of intelligent men together again after ten years, 
and if the presence of some penetrating and calm- 
ing genius could dispose them to frankness, what 


132 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


a confession of insanities would come up ! The 
“ causes ” to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or 
Democracy, Whigism or Abolition, Temperance or 
Socialism would show like roots of bitterness and 
dragons of wrath ; and our talents are as mis- 
chievous as if each had been seized upon by some 
bird of prey which had whisked him away from 
fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the 
poets ; — some zeal, some bias, and only when he 
was now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its 
claws and he awaking to sober perceptions. 

Culture is the suggestion, from certain best 
thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities 
through which he can modulate the violence of any 
master-tones that have a droning preponderance in 
his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture 
redresses his balance, puts him among his equals 
and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympa- 
thy and warns him of the dangers of solitude and 
repulsion. 

It is not a compliment but a disparagement to 
consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on 
theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever 
he appears, considerately to turn the conversation 
to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the 
Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor’s house had 
five hundred and forty floors ; and man’s house has 
five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is 


CULTURE. 


138 


facility of adaptation and of transition through 
many related points, to wide contrasts and ex- 
tremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit 
of his .village or his city. We must leave our pets 
at home when we go into the street, and meet men 
on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. 
No performance is worth loss of geniality. ’T is 
a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called 
fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, All- 
fadir did not get a -drink of Mimir’s spring (the 
fountain of wisdom) until he left his eye in pledge. 
And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his 
wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by 
the best, if their conversation do not fit his imper- 
tinency, — here is he to afflict us with his person^ 
alities. ’Tis incident to scholars that each of 
them fancies he is pointedly odious in his commu- 
nity. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. 
Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. 
You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge 
at Mimir’s spring. If you are the victim of your 
doing, who cares what you do? We can spare 
your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, 
your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius 
pays dear for his distinction. His head runs up 
into a spire, and instead of a healthy man, merry 
and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reck- 
less of the individual. When she has points to 


134 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and 
sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they 
are so accurately made for this that they are im- 
prisoned in those places. Each animal out of its 
habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, 
each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A 
soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk and a dancer 
could not exchange functions. And thus we are 
victims of adaptation. 

The antidotes against this organic egotism are 
the range and variety of attractions, as gained by 
acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, 
with classes of society, with travel, with eminent 
persons, and with the high resources of philosophy , 
art, and religion ; books, travel, society, solitude. 

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, 
a pointer trained, or who has visited a menagerie 
or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not 
deny the validity of education. “ A boy,” says 
Plato, “ is the most vicious of all wild beasts ; ” 
and in the same spirit the old English poet Gas- 
coigne says, “ A boy is better unborn than un- 
taught.” The city breeds one kind of speech and 
manners ; the back country a different style ; the 
sea another ; the army a fourth. W e know that 
an army which can be confided in may be formed 
by discipline ; that by systematic discipline all men 
may be made heroes : Marshal Lannes said to a 


CULTURE. 


135 


French officer, “ Know, Colonel, that none bht/ 




>> 


poltroon will boast that he never was afraijT.” A 
great part of courage is the courage of having 
the thing before. And in all human actipn those ^ j 
faculties will be strong which are used. Robert 
Owen said, “ Give me a tiger, and I will educate 
him.” ’T is inhuman to want faith in the power 
of education, since to meliorate is the law of na- 
ture ; and men are valued precisely as they exert 
onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, 
poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to 
be incurable. 

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal dis- 
temper. There are people who can never under- 
stand a trope or any second or expanded sense 
given to your words, or any humor ; but remain 
literalisfcs, after hearing the music and poetry and 
rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They 
are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even 
these can understand pitchforks and the cry of 
Fire ! and I have noticed in some of this class a 
marked dislike of earthquakes. 

Let us make our education brave and preventive. 

Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. We 
are always a little late. The evil is done, the law 
is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for 
repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented 
the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede 


136 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


^ politics by education. What we call our root-and- 
branch Reforms, of slavery, war, gambling, intem- 
p^ihice, is only medicating the symptoms. We 
i i / must begin higher up, namely in Education. 

Qhr arts and tools give to him who can handle 
them much the same advantage over the novice as 
if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred 


years. And I think it the part of good sense to 
provide every fine soul with such culture that it 
shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say 
‘ This which I might do is made hopeless through 
my want of weapons/ 

But it is conceded that much of our training 
fails of effect ; that all success is hazardous and 
rare ; that a large part of our cost and pains is 
thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her 
own hands, and though we must not omit any jot 
of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has 
availed much, or that as much good would not 
have accrued from a different system. 

Books, as containing the finest records of human 
wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. 
The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, 
Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were 
well-read, universally educated men, and quite too 
wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has 
weight, because they had means of knowing the op- 
posite opinion. We look that a great man should 


CULTURE. 


137 


be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontane- 
ous power should be the assimilating power. Good 
criticism is very rare and always precious. I am 
always happy to meet persons who perceive the 
transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all 
other writers. I like people who like Plato. Be- 
cause this love does not consist with self-conceit. 

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready 
for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. 
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’t is 
the schoolboys who educate him. You send him 
to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, 
on his way to school, from the shop-windows. You 
like the strict rules and the long terms ; and he 
finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and 
refuses any companions but of his choosing. He 
hates the grammar and Gradus , and loves guns, 
fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy 
is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing- 
up if your theory leaves out his gymnastic train- 
ing. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse 
and boat, are all educators, liberalizers ; and so are 
dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and provided 
only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and 
ingenuous strain, these will not serve him less than 
the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing and 
theatricals. The father observes that another boy 
has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. 


138 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


But the first hoy has acquired much more than 
these poor games along with them. He is infatu- 
ated for weeks with whist and chess ; hut presently 
will find out, as you did, that when he rises from 
the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn 
and despises himself. Thenceforward it takes 
place with other things, and has its due weight in 
his experience. These minor skills and accom- 
plishments, for example dancing, are tickets of 
admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the 
being master of them enables the youth to judge 
intelligently of much on which otherwise he would 
give a pedantic squint. Landor said, “ I have suf- 
fered more from my bad dancing than from all the 
misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.” 
Provided always the boy is teachable (for we are 
not proposing to make a statue out of punk), foot- 
ball, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climb- 
ing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, 
which it is his main business to learn ; — riding, 
specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, 
u A good rider on a good horse is as much above 
himself and others as the world can make him.” 
Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse, con- 
stitute, among all who use them, secret freemason- 
ries. They are as if they belonged to one club. 

There is also a negative value in these arts. 
Their chief use to the youth is not amusement, 


CULTURE. 


139 

but to be known for what they are, and not to re- 
main to him occasions of heart-burn. We are 
full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on 
the advantages it has not ; the refined, on rude 
strength ; the democrat, on birth and breeding. 
One of the benefits of a college education is to 
show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading 
man in a leading city, who, having set his heart 
on an education at the university and missed it, 
could never quite feel himself the equal of his own 
brothers who had gone thither. His easy superi- 
ority to multitudes of professional men could never 
quite countervail to him this imaginary defect. 
Balls, riding, wine-parties and billiards pass to a 
poor boy for something fine and romantic, which 
they are not ; and a free admission to them on an 
equal footing, if it were possible, only once or 
twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by unde- 
ceiving him. 

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I 
observe that men run away to other countries be- 
cause they are not good in their own, and run back 
to their own because they pass for nothing in the 
new places. For the most part, only the light char- 
acters travel. Who are you that have no task to 
keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying 
captious things about travel ; but I mean to do jus- 
tice. I think there is a restlessness in our people 


140 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


which argues want of character. All educated 
Americans, first or last, go to Europe ; perhaps be- 
cause it is their mental home, as the invalid habits 
of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher 
of girls said, “ the idea of a girl’s education is, 
whatever qualifies her for going to Europe.” Can 
we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the 
brain of our countrymen ? One sees very well what 
their fate must be. He that does not fill a place at 
home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide 
his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not 
think you will find anything there which you have 
not seen at home ? The stuff of all countries is just 
the same. Do you suppose there is any country 
where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the 
infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish ? 
What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And 
let him go where he will, he can only find so much 
beauty or worth as he carries. 

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. 
Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are born. Some 
men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, mis- 
sionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for 
farmers and working-men. And if the man is of a 
light and social turn, and Nature has aimed to make 
a legged and winged creature, framed for locomo- 
tion, we must follow her hint and furnish him with 
that breeding which gives currency, as sedulously 


CULTURE. 


141 


as with that which gives worth. But let us not 
be pedantic, but allow to travel its full effect. The 
boy grown up on a farm, which he has never left, 
is said in the country to have had no chance, and 
boys and men of that condition look upon work 
on a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as opportunity. 
Poor country boys of Vermont and Connecticut 
formerly owed what knowledge they had to their 
peddling trips to the Southern States. California 
and the Pacific Coast is now the university of this 
class, as Virginia was in old times. ‘ To have some 
chance ’ is their word. And the phrase ‘ to know 
the world,’ or to travel, is synonymous with all 
men’s ideas of advantage and superiority. No 
doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. 
As many languages as he has, as many friends, as 
many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. 
A foreign country is a point of comparison where- 
from to judge his own. One use of travel is to 
recommend the books and works of home, — we 
go to Europe to be Americanized; and another, to 
find men. For as Nature has put fruits apart in 
latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge 
and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men. 
And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each 
man wants among his contemporaries, it often hap- 
pens that one or two of them live on the other side 
of the world. 


142 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain 
solstice when the stars stand still in our inward 
firmament, and when there is required some foreign 
force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stag- 
nation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems 
one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the ad- 
mirable effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating 
on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, 
rejoices in Dr. Jackson’s benign discovery, so a 
man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, 
says, ‘ If I should be driven from my own home, 
here at least my thoughts can be consoled by the 
most prodigal amusement and occupation which 
the human race in ages could contrive and accumu- 
late.’ 

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic 
value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town 
and country life, neither of which we can spare. 
A man should live in or near a large town, because, 
let his own genius be what it may, it will repel 
quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it 
draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the 
citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repul- 
sion, and drag the most improbable hermit within 
its walls some day in the year. In town he can 
find the swimming - school, the gymnasium, the 
dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, 
and panorama ; the chemist’s shop, the museum of 


CULTURE. 


143 


natural history ; the gallery of fine arts ; the na- 
tional orators, in their turn ; foreign travellers, the 
libraries and his club. In the country he can find 
solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and 
his old shoes ; moors for game, hills for geology 
and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, “ I have 
heard Thomas Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of 
Devon’s house, in Derbyshire, there was a good 
library and books enough for him, and his lordship 
stored the library with what books he thought fit 
to be bought. But the want of good conversation 
was a very great inconvenience, and, though he 
conceived he could order his thinking as well as 
another, yet he found a great defect. In the coun- 
try, in long time, for want of good conversation, 
one’s understanding and invention contract a moss 
on them, like an old paling in an orchard.” 

Cities give us collision. It is said, London and 
New York take the nonsense out of a man. A 
great part of our education is sympathetic and so- 
cial. Boys and girls who have been brought up 
with well-informed and superior people show in 
their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says 
that 45 William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject 
from the King of Spain, every time he put off his 
hat.” You cannot have one well-bred man without 
a whole society of such. They keep each other up 
to any high point. Especially women *, it requires 


144 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


a great many cultivated women, — saloons of bright, 
elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and re- 
finement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, 
and to elegant society, — in order that you should 
have one Madame de Stael. The head of a com- 
mercial house or a leading lawyer or politician is 
brought into daily contact with troops of men from 
all parts of the country, and those too the driving- 
wheels, the business men of each section, and one 
can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more 
searching culture. Besides, we.must remember the 
high social possibilities of a million of men. The 
best bribe which London offers to-day to the im- 
agination is that in such a vast variety of people 
and conditions one can believe there is room for 
persons of romantic character to exist, and that the 
poet, the mystic and the hero may hope to confront 
their counterparts. 

I wish cities could teach their best lesson, — of 
quiet manners. It is the foible especially of Amer- 
ican youth, — pretension. The mark of the man 
of the world is absence of pretension. He does 
not make a speech, he takes a low business-tone, 
avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises 
not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, 
bugs his fact. He calls his employment by its 
lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their 
sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the 


CULTURE. 


145 


weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be 
surprised into thought and the unlocking of his 
learning and philosophy. How the imagination is 
piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing in- 
cognito, as a king in gray clothes ; of Napoleon 
affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee; of 
Burns or Scott or Beethoven or Wellington or 
Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, 
passing for nobody ; of Epaminondas, “ who never 
says anything, but will listen eternally ; ” of Goethe, 
who preferred trifling subjects and common expres- 
sions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather 
than better clothes, and to appear a little more ca- 
pricious than he was. There are advantages in the 
old hat and box-coat. I have heard that through- 
out this country a certain respect is paid to good 
broadcloth ; but dress makes a little restraint ; men 
will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is 
like wine, it unlocks the tongue, and men say what 
they think. An old poet says, — 

“ Go far and go sparing, 

For you’ll find it certain, 

The poorer and the baser you appear, 

The more you’ll look through still.” 1 

Not much otherwise Milnes writes in the “ Lay of 
the Humble,” — 

2 Beaumont and Fletcher : The Tamer Tamed. 

10 


VOL. vi. 


146 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


<l To me men are for wliat they are, 

They wear no masks with me.” 

It is odd that our people should have — not water 
on the brain, hut a little gas there. A shrewd for- 
eigner said of the Americans that “whatever they 
say has a little the air of a speech.” Yet one of 
the traits down in the books as distinguishing the 
Anglo-Saxon is a trick of self-disparagement. To 
be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of 
good coats a fine coat comes to be no distinction, 
and you find humorists. In an English • party a 
man with no marked manners or features, with a 
face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, 
learning, a wide range of topics and personal fa- 
miliarity with good men in all parts of the world, 
until you think you have fallen upon some illus- 
trious personage. Can it be that the American 
forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish bar- 
barism just ready to die out, — the love of the 
scarlet feather, of beads and tinsel ? The Italians 
are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes and em- 
broidery; and I remember one rainy morning in 
the city of Palermo the street was in a blaze with 
scarlet umbrellas. The English have a plain taste. 
The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gor- 
geous livery indicates new and awkward city wealth. 
Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of Mister 
good against any king in Europe. They have 


CULTURE. 


147 


piqued themselves on governing the whole world 
in the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the 
House of Commons sat in, before the fire. 

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the 
best things are found, cities degrade us by magnify- 
ing trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop- 
house, a barber’s shop. He has lost the lines of 
grandeur of the horizon, hills, and plains, and with 
them sobriety and elevation. He has come among 
a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, ser- 
vile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to 
a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say 
the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are 
their own ; but in cities they have betrayed you to 
a cloud of insignificant annoyances : — 

“ Mirmidons, race feeonde, 

Mirmidons, 

Enfin nous commandons : 

Jupiter livre le monde 

Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons.” 1 

’T is heavy odds 
Against the gods, 

When they will match with myrmidons. 

We spawning, spawning myrmidons, 

Our turn to-day ! we take command, 

Jove gives the globe into the hand 
Of myrmidons, of myrmidons. 

1 Beranger. 


148 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


What is odious but noise, and people who scream 
and bewail ? people whose vane points always east, 
who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who 
coddle themselves, who toast their feet on the reg- 
ister, who intrigue to secure a padded chair and a 
corner out of the draught. Suffer them once to 
begin the enumeration of their infirmities and the 
sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let 
these triflers put us out of conceit with petty com- 
forts. To a man at work, the frost is but a color ; 
the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in. 
Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie 
hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate 
has certain good effects not easily estimated. Nei- 
ther will we be driven into a quiddling abstemious- 
ness. . ’T is a superstition to insist on a special diet. 
All is made at last of the same chemical atoms. 

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little 
wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or 
salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in 
company, or wealth, or even the bringing things 
to pass, — when you think how paltry are the 
machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was 
praised to me in Westmoreland for having af- 
forded to his country neighbors an example of a 
modest household where comfort and culture were 
secured without display. And a tender boy who 
wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he 


CULTURE. 


149 


may secure the coveted place in college and the 
right in the library, is educated to some purpose. 
There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness 
in poor and middle-class houses in town and coun- 
try, that has not got into literature and never will, 
but that keeps the earth sweet ; that saves on su- 
perfluities, and spends on essentials ; that goes 
rusty and educates the boy ; that sells the horse 
but builds the school ; works early and late, takes 
two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, 
but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, 
and then goes back cheerfully to work again. 

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits 
of cities ; they must be used, yet cautiously and 
haughtily, — and will yield their best values to 
him who best can do without them. Keep the 
town for occasions, but the habits should be formed 
to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of medioc- 
rity, is, to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure 
shelter where moult the wings which will bear it 
farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire 
and lead his race must be defended from travel- 
ling with the souls of other men, from living, 
breathing, reading and writing in the daily, time- 
worn yoke of their opinions. “ In the morning, — 
solitude ; ” said Pythagoras ; that Nature may 
speak to the imagination, as she does never in 
company, and that her favorite may make ac« 


150 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


quaintance with those divine strengths which dis< 
close themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 
’T is very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, 
Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not 
live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to 
time as benefactors; and the wise instructor will 
press this point of securing to the young soul in 
the disposition of time and the arrangements of 
living, periods and habits of solitude. The high 
advantage of university life is often the mere me- 
chanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber 
and fire, — which parents will allow the boy with- 
out hesitation at Cambridge, but do not think 
needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the 
character of the tone of thought ; but if it can be 
shared between two or more than two, it is happier 
and not less noble. “We four,” wrote Neander to 
his sacred friends, “ will enjoy at Halle the inward 
blessedness of a civitas Dei , whose foundations are 
forever friendship. The more I know you, the 
more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted 
companions. Their very presence stupefies me. 
The common understanding withdraws itself from 
the one centre of all existence.” 

Solitude takes off the pressure of present impor- 
tunities, that more catholic and humane relations 
may appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to 
ends the most public and universal, and it is the 


CULTURE. 


151 


secret of culture to interest the man more in his 
public than in his private quality. Here is a new 
poem, which elicits a good many comments in the 
journals and in conversation. From these it is 
easy at last to gather the verdict which readers 
passed upon it ; and that is, in the main, unfavor- 
able. The poet, as a craftsman, is only interested 
in the praise accorded to him, and not in the cen- 
sure, though it be just. And the poor little poet 
hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure as 
proving incapacity in the critic. But tho poet cul- 
tivated becomes a stockholder in both companies, 
— say Mr. Curfew in the Curfew stock, and in the 
humanity stock ; — and, in the last, exults as much 
in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew, 
as his interest in the former gives him pleasure in 
the currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of 
his Curfew stock only shows the immense values 
of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with 
his critic against himself, with joy, he is a culti- 
vated man. 

We must have an intellectual quality in all prop- 
erty and in all action, or they are naught. I must 
have children, I must have events, I must have a 
social state and history, or my thinking and speak- 
ing want body or basis. But to give these acces- 
sories any value, I must know them as contingent 
and rather showy possessions, which pass for more 


152 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


to the people than to me. We see this abstraction 
in scholars, as a matter of course ; but what a charm 
it adds when observed in practical men. Bona- 
parte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look 
at every object for itself, without affection. Though 
an egotist d ontrance, he could criticize a play, a 
building, a character, on universal grounds, and 
give a just opinion. A man known to us only as 
a celebrity in politics or in trade gains largely in 
our esteem if we discover that he has some intel- 
lectual taste or skill ; as when we learn of Lord 
Fairfax, the Long Parliament’s general, his pas- 
sion for antiquarian studies ; or of the French reg- 
icide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics ; 
or of a living banker, his success in poetry ; or of 
a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. 
So, if in travelling in the dreary wildernesses of 
Arkansas or Texas we should observe on the next 
seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Cal- 
deron, we should wish to hug him. 

We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when 
we say that culture opens the sense of beauty. 
A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, 
and however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the 
social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at 
self-possession. I suffer every day from the want 
of perception of beauty in people. They do not 
know the charm with which all moments and ob 


CULTURE. 


158 


jects can be embellished, the charm of manners, of 
self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheer- 
fulness are the badge of the gentleman, — repose 
in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm ; the 
heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain 
a serene aspect ; as we say of Niagara that it falls 
without speed. A cheerful intelligent face is the 
end of culture, and success enough. For it indi- 
cates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained. 

When our higher faculties are in activity we are 
domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give 
place to natural and agreeable movements. It is 
noticed that the consideration of the great periods 
and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind 
and an indifference to death. The influence of fine 
scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our 
irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a 
high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathe- 
dral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have 
heard that stiff people lose something of their awk- 
wardness under high ceilings and in spacious halls. 
I think sculpture and painting have an effect to 
teach us manners and abolish hurry. 

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher 
influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of poli- 
tics, or of trade and the useful arts. There is a 
certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal 
and adjust particulars, which can only come from 


154 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


an insight of their whole connection. The orator 
who has once seen things in their divine order will 
never quite lose sight of this, and will come to 
affairs as from a higher ground, and though he will 
say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain 
mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness 
of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish 
his handling from that of attorneys and factors. 
A man who stands on a good footing with the 
heads of parties at Washington, reads the rumors 
of the newspapers and the guesses of provincial 
politicians with a key to the right and wrong in 
each statement, and sees well enough where all this 
will end. Archimedes will look through your Con- 
necticut machine at a glance, and judge of its fit- 
ness. And much more a wise man who knows not 
only what Plato, but what Saint John can show 
him, can easily raise the affair he deals with to a 
certain majesty. Plato says Pericles owed this 
elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke 
descended from a higher sphere when he would in- 
fluence human affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jeffer- 
son, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before 
which the brawls of modern senates are but pot- 
house politics. 

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are 
not for the apprentices but for proficients. These 
are lessons only for the brave. We must know our 


CULTURE. 


155 


friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our 
friends. Ben J onson specifies in his address to the 
Muse : — 

“ Get him the time’s long grudge, the court’s ill-will, 
And, reconciled, keep him suspected still, 

Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse, 
Almost all ways to any better course ; 

With me thou leav’st a better Muse than thee, 

And which thou brought’st me, blessed Poverty.” 

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at 
heroism. But the wiser God says, Take the shame, 
the poverty and the penal solitude that belong to 
truth-speaking. Try the rough water as well as 
the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth 
knowing. When the state is unquiet, personal 
qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a 
revolution which will constrain you to live five 
years in one. Don’t be so tender at making an 
enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coven- 
try sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you 
their coldest contempts. The finished man of the 
world must eat of every apple once. He must hold 
his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember 
spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but 
values men only as channels of power. 

He who aims high must dread an easy home and 
popular manners. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare 
character about with ungainliness and odium, as 


156 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any 
great and good thing in store for you, it will not 
come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape 
of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popu- 
larity is for dolls. “ Steep and craggy,” said Por- 
phyry, “ is the path of the gods.” Open your Mar- 
cus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients he 
was the great man who scorned to shine, and who 
contested the frowns of fortune. They preferred 
the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending 
with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to 
her companion borne into harbor with colors flying 
and guns firing. There is none of the social goods 
that may not be purchased too dear, and mere ami- 
ableness must not take rank with high aims and 
self-subsistency. 

Bettine replies to Goethe’s mother, who chides 
her disregard of dress, — “If I cannot do as I have 
a mind in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry 
things far.” And the youth must rate at its true 
mark the inconceivable levity of local opinion. 
The longer we live the more we must endure the 
elementary existence of men and women ; and 
every brave heart must treat society as a child, and 
never allow it to dictate. 

“ All that class of the severe and restrictive vir- 
tues,” said Burke, “ are almost too costly for hu- 
manity.” Who wishes to be severe ? Who wishes 


CULTURE . 


157 


to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the 
poor, and low, and impolite ? And who that dares 
do it can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits ? 
The high virtues are not debonair, but have their 
redress in being illustrious at last. What forests 
of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to 
those who stood firm against the opinion of their 
contemporaries ! The measure of a master is his 
success in bringing all men round to his opinion 
twenty years later. 

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too 
early. In talking with scholars I observe that they 
lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood 
which alone could give imaginative literature a re- 
ligious and infinite quality in their esteem. I find 
too that the chance for appreciation is much in- 
creased by being the son of an appreciator, and that 
these boys who now grow up are caught not only 
years too late, but two or three births too late, to 
make the best scholars of. And I think it a pre- 
sentable motive to a scholar, that, as in an old com- 
munity a well-born proprietor is usually found, 
after the first heats of youth, to be a careful hus- 
band, and to feel a habitual desire that the estate 
shall suffer no harm by his administration, but 
shall be delivered down to the next heir in as good 
condition as he received it ; — so a considerate 
man will reckon himself a subject of that secular 


158 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, 
and refined ; and will shun every expenditure of his 
forces on pleasure or gain which will jeopardize 
this social and secular accumulation. 

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with 
rudimental forms and rose to the more complex as 
fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place ; 
and that the lower perish as the higher appear. 
Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished 
men. We still carry sticking to us some remains 
of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. 
We call these millions men ; but they are not yet 
men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, 
man needs all the music that can be brought to dis- 
engage him. If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; 
if Want with his scourge ; if War with his cannon- 
ade ; if Christianity with its charity : if Trade with 
its money ; if Art with its portfolios ; if Science 
with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and 
time can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud 
taps on the tough chrysalis can break its walls and 
let the new creature emerge erect and free, — make 
way and sing paean ! The age of the quadruped is 
to go out, the age of the brain and of the heart is to 
come in. The time will come when the evil forms 
we have known can no more be organized. Man’s 
culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. 
He is to convert all impediments into instruments, 


CULTURE. 


159 


all enemies into power. The formidable mischief 
will only make the more useful slave. And if one 
shall read the future of the race hinted in the or- 
ganic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and 
the corresponding impulse to the Better in the hu- 
man being, we shall dare affirm that there is noth- 
ing he will not overcome and convert, until at last 
culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He 
will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells 
into benefit. 




V. 


BEHAVIOR. 


Grace, Beauty, and Capric© 

Build this golden portal, 

Graceful women, chosen men 
Dazzle every mortal : 

Their sweet and lofty countenance 
His enchanting food ; 

He need not go to them, their forms 
Beset his solitude. 

He looketh seldom in their face, 

His eyes explore the ground, 

The green grass is a looking-glass 
Whereon their traits are found. 
Little he says to them, 

So dances his heart in his breast, 
Their tranquil mien bereaveth him 
Of wit, of words, of rest. 

Too weak to win, too fond to shun 
The tyrants of his doom, 

The much deceived Endymion 
Slips behind a tomb. 

11 


VOL. VI. 





BEHAVIOR. 


The soul which animates Nature is not less sig- 
nificantly published in the figure, movement and 
gesture of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle 
of articulate speech. This silent and subtile lan- 
guage is Manners ; not what , but how. Life ex- 
presses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. 
Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature 
tells every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells 
it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, 
face and parts of the face, and by the whole action 
of the machine. The visible carriage or action of 
the individual, as resulting from his organization 
and his will combined, we call manners. What are 
they but thought entering the hands and feet, con- 
trolling the movements of the body, the speech and 
behavior ? 

There is always a best way of doing everything, 
if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy 
way of doing things ; each, once a stroke of genius 
or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. 
They form at last a rich varnish with which the 
routine of life is washed and its details adorned. 
If they are superficial, so are the dew drops which 


164 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


give such a depth to the morning meadows. Man- 
ners are very communicable ; men catch them from 
each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of 
the lessons she had given the nobles in manners, 
on the stage ; and in real life, Talma taught Napo- 
leon the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine man- 
ners, which the baron and the baroness copy very 
fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the 
instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have 
learned, into a mode. 

The power of manners is incessant, — an ele- 
ment as unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot 
in any country be disguised, and no more in a re- 
public or a democracy than in a kingdom. No man 
can resist their influence. There are certain man- 
ners which are learned in good society, of that force 
that if a person have them, he or she must be con- 
sidered, and is everywhere welcome, though with- 
out beauty, or wealth, or genius. Give a boy ad- 
dress and accomplishments and you give him the 
mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. 
He has not the trouble of earning or owning them, 
they solicit him to enter and possess. We send 
girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the board- 
ing-school, to the riding-school, to the ball-room, or 
wheresoever they can come into acquaintance and 
nearness of leading persons of their own sex ; where 
they may learn address, and see it near at hand. 


BEHAVIOR. 


165 


The power of a woman of fashion to lead and also 
to daunt and repel, derives from their belief that 
she knows resources and behaviors not known to 
them ; but when these have mastered her secret 
they learn to confront her, and recover their self- 
possession. 

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. 
People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. 
The mediocre circle learns to demand that which 
belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. 
Your manners are always under examination, and 
by committees little suspected, a police in citizens’ 
clothes, who are awarding or denying you very high 
prizes when you least think of it. 

We talk much of utilities, but ’tis our manners 
that associate us. In hours of business we go to 
him who knows, or has, or does this or that which 
we want, and we do not let our taste or feeling 
stand in the way. But this activity over, we re- 
turn to the indolent state, and wish for those we 
can be at ease with ; those who will go where we 
go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social 
tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their 
persuasive and cheering force; how they recom- 
mend, prepare, and draw people together ; how, in 
all clubs, manners make the members ; how man- 
ners make the fortune of the ambitious youth ; that, 
for the most part, his manners marry him, and, for 


166 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the most part, he marries manners ; when we think 
what keys they are, and to what secrets ; what high 
lessons and inspiring tokens of character they con- 
vey, and what divination is required in us for the 
reading of this fine telegraph, — we see what range 
the subject has, and what relations to convenience, 
power and beauty. 

Their first service is very low, — when they are 
the minor morals ; but ’t is the beginning of civility, 
— to make us, I mean, endurable to each other. 
We prize them for their rough-plastic, abstergent 
force ; to get people out of the quadruped state ; to 
get them washed, clothed, and set up on end ; to 
slough their animal husks and habits ; compel them 
to be clean; overawe their spite and meanness; 
teach them to stifle the base and choose the gener- 
ous expression, and make them know how much 
happier the generous behaviors are. 

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is 
infested with rude, cynical, restless and frivolous 
persons, who prey upon the rest, and whom a pub- 
lic opinion concentrated into good manners — forms 
accepted by the sense of all — can reach : the con- 
tradictors and railers at public and private tables, 
who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a 
dog of honor to growl at any passer-by and do the 
honors of the house by barking him out of sight. I 
have seen men who neigh like a horse when you 


BEHAVIOR. 


167 


contradict tliem or say something which they do 
not understand : — then the overbold, who make 
their own invitation to your hearth ; the persevering 
talker, who gives you his society in large saturating 
doses ; the pitiers of themselves, a perilous class ; 
the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find 
him in ropes of sand to twist ; the monotones ; in 
short, every stripe of absurdity ; — these are social 
inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or de- 
fend you from, and which must be intrusted to the 
restraining force of custom and proverbs and fa- 
miliar rules of behavior impressed on young people 
in their school-days. 

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi 
they print, or used to print, among the rules of the 
house, that “ No gentleman can be permitted to 
come to the public table without his coat ; ” and 
in the same country, in the pews of the churches 
little placards plead with the worshipper against the 
fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-saeri- 
ficingly undertook the reformation of our American 
manners in unspeakable particulars. I think the 
lesson was not quite lost ; that it held bad man- 
ners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. 
Unhappily the book had its own deformities. It 
ought not to need to print in a reading-room a cau- 
tion to strangers not to speak loud ; nor to persons 
who look over fine engravings that they should be 


168 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


handled like cobwebs and butterflies’ wings ; nor 
to persons who look at marble statues that they 
shall not smite them with canes. But even in the 
perfect civilization of this city such cautions are 
not quite needless in the Athenaeum and City 
Library. 

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circum- 
stance as well as out of character. If you look at 
the pictures of patricians and of peasants of differ- 
ent periods and countries, you will see how well 
they match the same classes in our towns. The 
modern aristocrat not only is well drawn in Titian’s 
Venetian doges and in Roman coins and statues, 
but also in the pictures which Commodore Perry 
brought home of dignitaries in J apan. Broad lands 
and great interests not only arrive to such heads as 
can manage them, but form manners of power. A 
keen eye too will see nice gradations of rank, or 
see in the manners the degree of homage the party 
is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed 
every day to be courted and deferred to by the 
highest grandees, acquires a corresponding expec- 
tation and a becoming mode of receiving and reply- 
ing to this homage. 

There are always exceptional people and modes. 
English grandees affect to be farmers. Claver- 
house is a fop, and under the finish of dress and 
levity of behavior hides the terror of his war. But 


BEHAVIOR. 


1G9 


Nature and Destiny are honest, and never fail to 
leave their mark, to hang out a sign for each and 
for every quality. It is much to conquer one’s 
face, and perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he 
has got the whole secret when he has learned that 
disengaged manners are commanding. Don’t be 
deceived by a facile exterior. Tender men some- 
times have strong wills. W e had in Massachusetts 
an old statesman who had sat all his life in courts 
and in chairs of state without overcoming an ex- 
treme irritability of face, voice, and bearing ; when 
he spoke, his voice would not serve him ; it cracked, 
it broke, it wheezed, it piped ; — little cared he ; he 
knew that it had got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech 
his argument and his indignation. When he sat 
down, after speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and 
held on to his chair with both hands : but under- 
neath all this irritability was a puissant will, firm 
and advancing, and a memory in which lay in order 
and method like geologic strata every fact of his 
history, and under the control of his wilL 

Manners are partly factitious, but mainly there 
must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all 
culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of 
blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and mo- 
narchical fabrics of the Old World, has some rea- 
son in common experience. Every man, — mathe- 
matician, artist, soldier, or merchant, — looks with 


1T0 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

confidence for some traits and talents in his own 
child which he would not dare to presume in the 
child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very or- 
thodox on this point. “ Take a thorn-hush,” said 
the emir Abdel-Kader, “ and sprinkle it for a whole 
year with water; — it will yield nothing but thorns. 
Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it 
will always produce dates. Nobility is the date- 
tree and the Arab populace is a bush of thorns.” 

A main fact in the history of manners is the 
wonderful expressiveness of the human body. If 
it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts 
were written on steel tablets within, it could not 
publish more truly its meaning than now. Wise 
men read very sharply all your private history in 
your look and gait and behavior. The whole econ- 
omy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale 
body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches 
with crystal faces which expose the whole move- 
ment. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and 
down in these beautiful bottles and announcing to 
the curious how it is with them. The face and 
eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, 
what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity 
of the soul, or through how many forms it has 
already ascended. It almost violates the proprie- 
ties if we say above the breath here what the con- 
fessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street 
passenger. 


BEHAVIOR . 


171 


Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far 
seems imperfect. In Siberia a late traveller found 
men who could see the satellites of Jupiter with 
their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals 
excel us. The birds have a longer sight, beside the 
advantage by their wings of a higher observatory. 
A cow can bid her calf, by secret signal, probably 
of the eye, to run away or to lie down and hide 
itself. The jockeys say of certain horses that “ they 
look over the whole ground.” The out-door life 
and hunting and labor give equal vigor to the hu- 
man eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as 
the horse ; his eye-beam is like the stroke of a staff. 
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled 
gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking ; or in its 
altered mood by beams of kindness it can make 
the heart dance with joy. 

' The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. 
When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix and re- 
main gazing at a distance ; in enumerating the 
names of persons or of countries, as France, Ger- 
many, Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new 
name. There is no nicety of learning sought by 
the mind which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. 
“ An artist,” said Michael Angelo, “ must have his 
measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye ; 99 
and there is no end to the catalogue of its perform- 
ances, whether in indolent vision (that of health 


172 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


and beauty), or in strained vision (that of art and 
labor). 

Eyes are bold as lions, — roving, running, leap- 
ing, here and there, far and near. They speak all 
languages. They wait for no introduction ; they 
are no Englishmen ; ask no leave of age, or rank ; 
they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither 
learning nor power nor virtue nor sex ; but in- 
trude, and come again, and go through and through 
you in a moment of time. What inundation of 
life and thought is discharged from one soul into 
another, through them ! The glance is natural 
magic. The mysterious communication established 
across a house between two entire strangers, moves 
all the springs of w T onder. The communication by 
the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the 
control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of iden- 
tity of nature. We look into the eyes to know if 
this other form is another self, and the eyes will 
not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhab- 
itant is there. The revelations are sometimes ter- 
rific. The confession of a low, usurping devil is 
there made, and the observer shall seem to feel the 
stirring of owls and bats and horned hoofs, where 
he looked for innocence and simplicity. ’Tis re- 
markable too that the spirit that appears at the 
windows of the house does at once invest himself 
in a new form of his own to the mind of the be- 
holder. 


BEHAVIOR. 


173 


The eyes of men converse as much as their 
tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dia- 
lect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the 
world over. When the eyes say one thing and the 
tongue another, a practised man relies on the lan- 
guage of the first. If the man is off his centre, 
the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of 
your companion whether your argument hits him, 
though his tongue will not confess it. There is a 
look by which a man shows he is going to say a 
good tiling, and a look when he has said it. Yain 
and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices 
of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye. 
How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, 
though dissembled by the lips ! One comes away 
from a company in which, it may easily happen, 
he has said nothing and no important remark has 
been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy 
with the society, he shall not have a sense of this 
fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into 
him and out from him through the eyes. There 
are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission 
into the man than blueberries. Others are liquid 
and deep, — wells that a man might fall into ; — 
others are aggressive and devouring, seem to call 
out the police, take all too much notice, and require 
crowded Broadways and the security of millions to 
protect individuals against them. The military eye 


174 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


I meet, now darkly sparkling under clerical, now 
under rustic brows. ’T is the city of Lacedaemon ; 
’t is a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, 
asserting eyes, prowling eyes ; and eyes full of fate, 
— some of good and some of sinister omen. The 
alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity 
in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a 
victory achieved in the will, before it can be signi- 
fied in the eye. It is very certain that each man 
carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank 
in the immense scale of men, and we are always 
learning to read it. A complete man should need 
no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever 
looked on him would consent to his will, being cer- 
tified that his aims were generous and universal. 
The reason why men do not obey us is because they 
see the mud at the bottom of our eye. 

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, 
the other features have their own. A man finds 
room in the few square inches of the face for the 
traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of 
all his history and his wants. The sculptor and 
Winckelmann and Lavater will tell you how signi- 
ficant a feature is the nose ; how its forms express 
strength or weakness of will, and good or bad tem- 
per. The nose of Julius Caesar, of Dante, and of 
Pitt, suggest “the terrors of the beak.” What 
refinement and what limitations the teeth betray ! 


BEHAVIOR. 175 

16 Beware you don’t laugh,” said the wise mother, 
“ for then you show all your faults.” 

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter which he 
called “ Theorie de la demarche ,” in which he 
says, “ The look, the voice, the respiration, and the 
attitude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not 
been given to man the power to stand guard at 
once over these four different simultaneous expres- 
sions of his thought, watch that one which speaks 
out the truth, and you will know the whole man.” 

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of 
manners, which, in the idle and expensive society 
dwelling in them, are raised to a high art. The 
maxim of courts is that manner is power. A calm 
and resolute bearing, a polished speech, an embel- 
lishment of trifles, and the art of hiding all uncom- 
fortable feeling, are essential to the courtier ; and 
Saint Simon and Cardinal de Betz and Rcederer 
and an encyclopaedia of Memoires will instruct you, 
if you wish, in those potent secrets. Thus it is a 
point of pride with kings to remember faces and 
names. It is reported of one prince that his head 
had the air of leaning downwards, in order not to 
humble the crowd. There are people who come in 
ever like a child with a piece of good news. It 
was said of the late Lord Holland that he always 
came down to breakfast with the air of a man who 
had just met with some signal good-fortune. In 


176 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


64 JYStre Dame” the grandee took his place on the 
dais with the look of one who is thinking of some- 
thing else. But we must not peep and eavesdrop 
at palace-doors. 

Fine manners need the support of fine manners 
in others. A scholar may be a well-bred man, or 
he may not. The enthusiast is introduced to pol- 
ished scholars in society and is chilled and silenced 
by finding himself not in their element. They all 
have somewhat which he has not, and, it seems, 
ought to have. But if he finds the scholar apart 
from his companions, it is then the enthusiast’s 
turn, and the scholar has no defence, but must deal 
on his terms. Now they must fight the battle out 
on their private strength. What is the talent of 
that character so common — the successful man of 
the world — in all marts, senates, and drawing- 
rooms ? Manners : manners of power ; sense to 
see his advantage, and manners up to it. See him 
approach his man. He knows that troops behave 
as they are handled at first ; that is his cheap se- 
cret ; just what happens to every two persons who 
meet on any affair, — one instantly perceives that 
he has the key of the situation, that his will com- 
prehends the other’s will, as the cat does the mouse ; 
and he has only to use courtesy and furnish good- 
natured reasons to his victim to cover up the chain, 
lest he be shamed into resistance. 


BEHAVIOR. 


177 


The theatre in which this science of manners 
has a formal importance is not with us a court, but 
dress-circles, wherein, after the close of the day’s 
business, men and women meet at leisure, for mu- 
tual entertainment, in ornamented drawing-rooms. 
Of course it has every variety of attraction and 
merit ; but to earnest persons, to youths or maidens 
who have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it 
highly. A well-dressed talkative company where 
each is bent to amuse the other, — yet the highrborn 
Turk who came hither fancied that every woman 
seemed to be suffering for a chair; that all the 
talkers were brained and exhausted by the deoxy- 
genated air ; it spoiled the best persons ; it put 
all on stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies 
written and read. The aspect of that man is repul- 
sive ; I do not wish to deal with him. The other 
is irritable, shy, and on his guard. The youth 
looks humble and manly; I choose him. Look on 
this woman. There is not beauty, nor brilliant 
sayings, nor distinguished power to serve you ; but 
all see her gladly ; her whole air and impression 
are healthful. Here come the sentimentalists, and 
the invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in 
coming into the world and has always increased it 
since. Here are creep-mouse manners, and thiev- 
ish manners. “Look at Northcote,” said Fuseli ; 
u he looks like a rat that has seen a cat.” In the 
12 


VOL. VI. 


178 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


shallow company, easily excited, easily tired, here 
is the columnar Bernard ; the Alleghanies do not 
express more repose than his behavior. Here are 
the sweet following eyes of Cecile ; it seemed al- 
ways that she demanded the heart. Nothing can 
be more excellent in kind than the Corinthian grace 
of Gertrude’s manners, and yet Blanche, who has 
no manners, has better manners than she ; for the 
movements of Blanche are the sallies of a spirit 
which is sufficient for the moment, and she can 
afford to express every thought by instant action. 

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined 
to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a 
distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who 
do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her 
attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, 
and, if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at 
you, or quietly drops you. The first weapon en- 
rages the party attacked ; the second is still more 
effective, but is not to be resisted, as the date of the 
transaction is not easily found. People grow up 
and grow old under this infliction, and never sus- 
pect the truth, ascribing the solitude which acts on 
them very injuriously to any cause but the right 
one. 

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Ne- 
cessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed. 
Those who are not self-possessed obtrude and pain 


BE HAW OR. 


179 


us. Some men appear to feel that they belong to 
a Pariah caste. They fear to offend, they bend and 
apologize, and walk through life with a timid step. 
As we sometimes dream that we are in a well- 
dressed company without any coat, so Godfrey acts 
ever as if he suffered from some mortifying circum- 
stance. The hero should find himself at home, 
wherever he is ; should impart comfort by his own 
security and good-nature to all beholders. The 
hero is suffered to be himself. A person of strong 
mind comes to perceive that for him an immunity is 
secured so long as he renders to society that service 
which is native and proper to him, — an immunity 
from all the observances, yea, and duties, which 
society so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file 
of its members. “ Euripides,” says Aspasia, “ has 
not the fine manners of Sophocles ; but,” she adds 
good-humoredly, “the movers and masters of our 
souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs 
as carelessly as they please, on the world that be- 
longs to them, and before the creatures they have 
animated .” 1 

Manners require time, as nothing is more vul- 
gar than haste. Friendship should be surrounded 
with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into 
corners. Friendship requires more time than poor 
busy men can usually command. Here comes to 
1 Landor : Pericles and Aspasia . 


180 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading 
and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy 
ghost. ’T is a great destitution to both that this 
should not be entertained with large leisures, but 
contrariwise should be balked by importunate af- 
fairs. 

But through this lustrous varnish the reality is 
ever shining. ’T is hard to keep the what from 
breaking through this pretty painting of the how. 
The core will come to the surface. Strong will 
and keen perception overpower old manners and 
create new ; and the thought of the present mo- 
ment has a greater value than all the past. In 
persons of character we do not remark manners, 
because of their instantaneousness. We are sur- 
prised by the thing done, out of all power to watch 
the way of it. Yet nothing is more charming than 
to recognize the great style which runs through 
the actions of such. People masquerade before us 
in their fortunes, titles, offices, and connections, as 
academic or civil presidents, or senators, or profes- 
sors, or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, 
and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At 
least it is a point of prudent good manners to treat 
these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. 
But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, 
and they know him ; as when in Paris the chief 
of the police enters a ball-room, so many diamonded 


BEHAVIOR. 


181 


pretenders shrink and make themselves as incon- 
spicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating 
look as they pass. “ I had received,” said a sibyl, 
“ I had received at birth the fatal gift of penetra- 
tion ; ” and these Cassandras are always born. 

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A 
man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and 
contented expression, which everybody reads. And 
you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, 
except by making him the kind of man of whom 
that manner is the natural expression. Nature for- 
ever puts a premium on reality. What is done for 
effect is seen to be done for effect ; what is done 
for love is felt to be done for love. A man inspires 
affection and honor because he was not lying in 
Wait for these. The things of a man for which we 
Hsit him were done in the dark and the cold. A 
little integrity is better than any career. So deep 
are the sources of this surface-action that even the 
size of your companion seems to vary with his free- 
dom of thought. Not only is he larger, when at 
ease and his thoughts generous, but every thing 
around him becomes variable with expression. No 
carpenter’s rule, no rod and chain will measure the 
dimensions of any house or house-lot ; go into the 
house ; if the proprietor is constrained and defer- 
ring ’t is of no importance how large his house, how 
beautiful his grounds, — you quickly come to the 


182 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


end of all : but if the man is self-possessed, happy 
and at home, his house is deep-founded, indefinitely 
large and interesting, the roof and dome buoyant - 
as the sky. Under the humblest roof, the common- 
est person in plain clothes sits there massive, cheer- 
ful, yet formidable, like the Egyptian colossi. 

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor 
Champollion has set down the grammar -rules of 
this dialect, older than Sanscrit ; but they who can- 
not yet read English, can read this. Men take each 
other’s measure, when they meet for the first time, 
— and every time they meet. How do they get 
this rapid knowledge, even before they speak, of 
each other’s power and dispositions ? One would 
say that the persuasion of their speech is not in 
what they say, — or that men do not convince by 
their argument, but by their personality, by who 
they are, and what they said and did heretofore. 

A man already strong is listened to, and every 
thing he says is applauded. Another opposes him 
with sound argument, but the argument is scouted 
until by and by it gets into the mind of some 
weighty person ; then it begins to tell on the com- 
munity. 

Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the 
guaranty that the powers are not squandered in 
too much demonstration. In this country, where 
school education is universal, we have a superficial 


BEHAVIOR. 


183 


culture, and a profusion of reading and writing and 
expression. We parade our nobilities in poems 
and orations, instead of working them up into hap- 
piness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him 
who can understand it, — “ Whatever is known to 
thyself alone, has always very great value.” There 
is some reason to believe that when a man does not 
write his poetry it escapes by other vents through 
him, instead of the one vent of writing ; clings to 
his form and manners, whilst poets have often 
nothing poetical about them except their verses. 
Jacobi said that “ when a man has fully expressed 
his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it.” 
One would say, the rule is, — What a man is irre- 
sistibly urged to say, helps him and us. In ex- 
plaining his thought to others, he explains it to 
himself, but when he opens it for show, it corrupts 
him. 

Society is the stage on which manners are 
shown ; novels are their literature. Novels are 
the journal or record of manners, and the new im- 
portance of these books derives from the fact that 
the novelist begins to penetrate the surface and 
treat this part of life more worthily. The novels 
used to be all alike, and had a quite vulgar tone. 
The novels used to lead us on to a foolish interest 
in the fortunes of the boy and girl they described. 
The boy was to be raised from a humble to a high 


184 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


position. He was in want of a wife and a castle, 
and the object of the story was to supply him with 
one or both. We watched sympathetically, step 
by step, his climbing, until at last the point is 
gained, the wedding day is fixed, and we follow 
the gala procession home to the bannered portal, 
when the doors are slammed in our face and the 
poor reader is left outside in the cold, not enriched 
by so much as an idea or a virtuous impulse. 

But the victories of character are instant, and 
victories for all. Its greatness enlarges all. We 
are fortified by every heroic anecdote. The novels 
are as useful as Bibles if they teach you the secret 
that the best of life is conversation, and the great- 
est success is confidence, or perfect understanding 
between sincere people. ’T is a French definition 
of friendship, rien que s' entendre, good understand- 
ing. The highest compact we can make with our 
fellow, is, — 4 Let there be truth between us two 
forevermore.’ That is the charm in all good nov- 
els, as it is the charm in all good histories, that 
the heroes mutually understand, from the first, and 
deal loyally and with a profound trust in each 
other. It is sublinue to feel and say of another, 
I need never meet or speak or write to him ; we 
need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of 
remembrance ; I rely on him as on myself ; if he 
did thus or thus, I know it was right. 


BEHAVIOR . 


185 


In all tlie superior people I have met I notice 
directness, truth spoken more truly, as if every- 
thing of obstruction, of malformation, had been 
trained away. What have they to conceal ? What 
have they to exhibit ? Between simple and noble 
persons there is always a quick intelligence ; they 
recognize at sight, and meet on a better ground 
than the talents and skills they may chance to 
possess, namely on sincerity and uprightness. For 
it is not what talents or genius a man has, but 
how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship 
and character. The man that stands by himself, 
the universe stands by him also. It is related of 
the monk Basle, that being excommunicated by 
the Pope, he was, at his death, sent in charge of an 
angel to find a fit place of suffering in hell ; but 
such was the eloquence and good-humor of the 
monk, that wherever he went he was received 
gladly and civilly treated even by the most uncivil 
angels ; and when he came to discourse with them, 
instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took 
his part, and adopted his manners ; and even good 
angels came from far to see him and take up their 
abode with him. The angel that was sent to find 
a place of torment for him attempted to remove 
him to a worse pit, but with no better success ; for 
such was the contented spirit of the monk that he 
found something to praise in every place and com- 


186 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


pany, though in hell, and made a kind of heaven 
of it. At last the escorting angel returned with 
his prisoner to them that sent him, saying that no 
phlegethon could be found that would burn him ; 
for that in whatever condition, Basle remained 
incorrigibly Basle. The legend says his sentence 
was remitted, and he was allowed to go into 
heaven and was canonized as a saint. 

There is a stroke of magnanimity in the corre- 
spondence of Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, 
when the latter was King of Spain, and complained 
that he missed in Napoleon’s letters the affectionate 
tone which had marked their childish correspond- 
ence. “ I am sorry,” replies Napoleon, “ you 
think you shall find your brother again only in the 
Elysian Fields. It is natural that at forty he 
should not feel toward you as he did at twelve. 
But his feelings toward you have greater truth 
and strength. His friendship has the features of 
his mind.” 

How much we forgive to those who yield us the 
rare spectacle of heroic manners ! W e will pardon 
them the want of books, of arts, and even of the 
gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember 
them ! Here is a lesson which I brought along 
with me in boyhood from the Latin School, and 
which ranks with the best of Homan anecdotes. 
Marcus Scaurus was accused by Quintus Varius 


BEHAVIOR. 


187 


Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take 
arms against the Republic. But he, full of firm- 
ness and gravity, defended himself in this man- 
ner : — “ Quintus Yarius Hispanus alleges that 
Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, excited 
the allies to arms : Marcus Scaurus, President of 
the Senate, denies it. There is no witness. Which 
do you believe, Romans ? ” “ Utri creditis , Qui- 

rites f ” When he had said these words he was 
absolved by the assembly of the people. 

I have seen manners that make a similar im- 
pression with personal beauty ; that give the like 
exhilaration, and refine us like that ; and in memo- 
rable experiences they are suddenly better than 
beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But 
they must be marked by fine perception, the ac- 
quaintance with real beauty. They must always 
show self-control; you shall not be facile, apolo- 
getic, or leaky, but king over your word ; and every 
gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. 
Then they must be inspired by the good heart. 
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or 
behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain 
around us. It is good to give a stranger a meal, 
or a night’s lodging. It is better to be hospitable 
to his good meaning and thought, and give courage 
to a companion. We must be as courteous to a 
man as we are to a picture, which we are willing 


188 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


to give tlie advantage of a good light. Special 
precepts are not to he thought of ; the talent of 
well-doing contains them all. Every hour will 
show a duty as paramount as that of my whim just 
now, and yet I will write it, — that there is one 
topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to 
all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If 
you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you 
have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thun- 
derstroke, I beseech you by all angels to hold 
your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which 
all the housemates bring serene and pleasant 
thoughts, by corruption and groans. Come out of 
the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky 
out of your landscape. The oldest and the most 
deserving person should come very modestly into 
any newly awaked company, respecting the divine 
communications out of which all must be presumed 
to have newly come. An old man who added an 
elevating culture to a large experience of life, said 
to me, “ When you come into the room, I think I 
will study how to make humanity beautiful to 
you.” 

As respects the delicate question of culture I do 
not think that any other than negative rules can be 
laid down. For positive rules, for suggestion, Na- 
ture alone inspires it. Who dare assume to guide 
a youth, a maid, to perfect manners ? the golden 


BEHAVIOR . 


189 


mean is so delicate, difficult, — say frankly, unat- 
tainable. What finest hands would not he clumsy 
to sketch the genial precepts of the young girl’s 
demeanor ? The chances seem infinite against 
success ; and yet success is continually attained. 
There must not be secondariness, and ’t is a thou- 
sand to one that her air and manner will at once 
betray that she is not primary, but that there is 
some other one or many of her class to whom she 
habitually postpones herself. But Nature lifts her 
easily and without knowing it over these impossi- 
bilities, and v/e are continually surprised with 
graces and felicities not only unteachable but un- 
describable. 



VI. 


WORSHIP. 


This is he, who, felled by foes, 

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows ? 
He to captivity was sold, 

But him no prison-bars would hold : 
Though they sealed him in a rock, 
Mountain chains he can unlock : 

Thrown to lions for their meat, 

The crouching lion kissed his feet : 

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled, 

But arched o’er him an honoring vault. 
This is he men miscall Fate, 

Threading dark ways, arriving late, 

But ever coming in time to crown 
The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down. 

He is the oldest, and best known, 

More near than aught thou call’st thy own, 
Yet greeted in another’s eyes, 

Disconcerts with glad surprise. 

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers, 

Floods with blessings unawares. 

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, 
Severing rightly his from thine, 

Which is human, which divine. 















WORSHIP. 


Some of my friends have complained, when the 
preceding papers were read, that we discussed Pate, 
Power and Wealth on too low a platform; gave 
too much line to the evil spirit of the times ; too 
many cakes to Cerberus ; that we ran Cudworth’s 
risk of making, by excess of candor, the argument 
of atheism so strong that he could not answer it. 
I have no fears of being forced in my own despite 
to play as we say the devil’s attorney. I have no 
infirmity of faith ; no belief that it is of much im- 
portance what I or any man may say : I am sure 
that a certain truth will be said through me, though 
I should be dumb, or though I should try to say 
the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good 
soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his 
skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, be- 
cause I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. 
I have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who, 
when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look 
at his razor. We are of different opinions at dif- 
ferent hours, but we always may be said to be at 
heart on the side of truth. 

13 


VOL. VI. 


194 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


I see not why we should give ourselves such 
sanctified airs. If the Divine Providence has hid 
from men neither disease nor deformity nor cor- 
rupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in 
war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, 
in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures and 
arts, — let us not be so nice that we cannot write 
these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt 
but there is a counter -statement as ponderous, 
which we can arrive at, and which, being put, will 
make all square. The solar system has no anxiety 
about its reputation, and the credit of truth and 
honesty is as safe ; nor have I any fear that a skep- 
tical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides 
of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the 
doctrine of Faith cannot down- weigh. The strength 
of that principle is not measured in ounces and 
pounds; it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. We 
may well give skepticism as much line as we can. 
The spirit will return and fill us. It drives the 
drivers. It counterbalances any accumulations of 
power : — 

“ Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow.” 

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made 
of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster ; 
and whether your community is made in Jerusalem 
or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it coheres 
in a perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, 


WORSHIP. 


195 


or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they were 
more refined, it would be less formal, it would be 
nervous, like that of the Shakers, who, from long 
habit of thinking and feeling together it is said are 
affected in the same way, at the same time, to work 
and to play ; and as they go with perfect sympathy 
to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they in- 
clined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, 
and the horses come up with the family carriage 
unbespoken to the door. 

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as 
a tree bears apples. A self-poise belongs to every 
particle, and a rectitude to every mind, and is the 
Nemesis and protector of every society. I and my 
neighbors have been bred in the notion that unless 
we came soon to some good church, — Calvinism, 
or Behmenism, or Romanism, or Mormonism, — 
there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. 
No Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can 
exceed the anarchy that has followed in our skies. 
The stern old faiths have all pulverized. ’T is a 
whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in 
search of religions. ’T is as flat anarchy in our 
ecclesiastic realms as that which existed in Massa- 
chusetts in the Revolution, or which prevails now 
on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike’s 
Peak. Yet we make shift to live. Men are loyal. 
Nature has self-poise in all her works ; certain 


196 


CONDUCT OF. LIFE. 


proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, 
and not less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in 
the spring and the regulator. The decline of the 
influence of Calvin, or Fcnelon, or Wesley, or 
Channing, need give us no uneasiness. The builder 
of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature 
as that the religion, that is, the public nature, 
should fall out : the public and the private ele- 
ment, like north and south, like inside and out- 
side, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to 
every soul, and cannot be subdued except the soul 
is dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart 
on the ruins of churches and religions. 

In the last chapters we treated some particulars 
of the question of culture. But the whole state of 
man is a state of culture ; and its flowering and 
completion may be described as Religion, or Wor- 
ship. There is always some religion, some hope 
and fear extended into the invisible, — from the 
blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the mast 
or the threshold, up to the song of the Elders in 
the Apocalypse. But the religion cannot rise 
above the state of the votary. Heaven always 
bears some proportion to earth. The god of the 
cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a 
crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. In 
all ages, souls out of time, extraordinary, prophetic, 
are born, who are rather related to the system of 


WORSHIP. 


197 


the world than to their particular age and locality. 
These announce absolute truths, which, with what- 
ever reverence received, are speedily dragged down 
into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of 
our Indians and some of the Pacific islanders flog 
their gods when things take an unfavorable turn. 
The Greek poets did not hesitate to let loose their 
petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in his 
anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had built Troy 
for him and demanded their price, does not hesitate 
to menace them that he will cut their ears off . 1 
Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf’s mode of 
converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan 
of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. 
“ Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ ? ” asks 
Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was 
an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant dis- 
ciple Rand, who refused to believe. 

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified Eu- 
ropean culture, — the grafted or meliorated tree 
in a crab forest. And to marry a pagan wife or 
husband was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to 
take a step backwards towards the baboon : — 

“ Hengist had verament 
A daughter both fair and gent, 

But she was heathen Sarazine, 

And Vortigern for love fine 


1 Iliad, Book xxi. 1. 455. 


198 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Her took to fere and to wife, 

And was cursed in all his life; 

For he let Christian wed heathen, 

And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen .” 1 

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew 
from the pagan sources, Richard of Devizes’ chron- 
icle of Richard I.’s crusade, in the twelfth century, 
may show. King Richard taunts God with for- 
saking him : “ O fie ! O how unwilling should I 
be to forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a 
position, were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art 
mine. In sooth, my standards will in future be 
despised, not through my fault, but through thine : 
in sooth not through any cowardice of my war- 
fare art thou thyself, my king and my God, con- 
quered this day, and not Richard thy vassal.” 
The religion of the early English poets is anoma^ 
lous, so devout and so blasphemous, in the same 
breath. Such is Chaucer’s extraordinary confu- 
sion of heaven and earth in the picture of Dido : — 

“ She was so fair, 

So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad, 

That if that God that heaven and earthe made 
Would have a love for beauty and goodness, 

And womanhede, truth, and seemliness, 

Whom should he loven but this lady sweet ? 

There n’ is no womau to him half so meet.” 

With these grossnesses, we complacently com 


1 Moths or worms. 


WORSHIP . 


199 


pare our own taste and decorum. We think and 
speak with more temperance and gradation, — hut 
is not indifferentism as bad as superstition ? 

We live in a transition period, when the old 
faiths which comforted nations, and not only so 
but made nations, seem to have spent their force. 
I do not find the religions of men at this moment 
very creditable to them, but either childish and 
insignificant or unmanly and effeminating. The 
fatal trait is the divorce between religion and 
morality. Here are know-nothing religions, or 
churches that proscribe intellect; scortatory relig- 
ions ; slave-holding and slave-trading religions ; 
and, even in the decent populations, idolatries 
wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet 
indulgence. The lover of the old religion com- 
plains that our contemporaries, scholars as well as 
merchants, succumb to a great despair, — have cor- 
rupted into a timorous conservatism and believe 
in nothing. In our large cities the population is 
godless, materialized, — no bond, no fellow-feeling, 
no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, 
thirsts, fevers and appetites walking. How is it 
people manage to live on, — so aimless as they 
are ? After their pepper-corn aims are gained, it 
seems as if the lime in their bones alone held 
them together, and not any worthy purpose. There 
is no faith in the intellectual, none in the moral 


200 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


universe. There is faith in chemistry, in meat 
and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam- 
engine, galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, sewing- 
machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine 
causes. A silent revolution has loosed the tension 
of the old religious sects, and in place of the grav- 
ity and permanence of those societies of opinion, 
they run into freak and extravagance. In creeds 
never was such levity ; witness the heathenisms in 
Christianity, the periodic “revivals,” the Millen- 
nium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retro- 
gression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, 
the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of rap- 
pings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps in 
table-drawers, and black art. The architecture, 
the music, the prayer, partake of the madness ; the 
arts sink into shift and make-believe. Not know- 
ing what to do, we ape our ancestors ; the churches 
stagger backward to the mummeries of the Dark 
Ages. By the irresistible maturing of the general 
mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. 
The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being 
dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral 
teacher, it is impossible to maintain the old empha- 
sis of his personality ; and it recedes, as all per- 
sons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws. 
From this change, and in the momentary absence 
of any religious genius that could offset the im. 


WORSHIP. 


201 


mense material activity, there is a feeling that 
religion is gone. When Paul Leroux offered his 
article “ Dieu ” to the conductor of a leading 
French journal, he replied, “ La question cle Dieu 
manque cTactualitS .” In Italy, Mr. Gladstone 
said of the late King of Naples, “It has been a 
proverb that he has erected the negation of God 
into a system of government.” In this country 
the like stupefaction was in the air, and the phrase 
“ higher law ” became a political jibe. What proof 
of infidelity like the toleration and propagandism 
of slavery ? What, like the direction of education ? 
What, like the facility of conversion ? What, like 
the externality of churches that once sucked the 
roots of right and wrong, and now have perished 
away till they are a speck of whitewash on the 
wall ? What proof of skepticism like the base 
rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts 
are held ? Let a man attain the highest and 
broadest culture that any American has possessed, 
then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or 
other accident, and all America will acquiesce that 
the best thing has happened to him ; that, after 
the education has gone far, such is the expensive- 
ness of America that the best use to put a fine 
person to is to drown him to save his board. 

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in 
human virtue. It is believed by well-dressed pro- 


202 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


prietors that there is no more virtue than they pos- 
sess ; that the solid portion of society exist for 
the arts of comfort ; that life is an affair to put 
somewhat between the upper and lower mandibles. 
How prompt the suggestion of a low motive ! Cer- 
tain patriots in England devoted themselves for 
years to creating a public opinion that should 
break down the corn-laws and establish free trade. 

4 Well,’ says the man in the street, 4 Cobden got 
a stipend out of it.’ Kossuth fled hither across the 
ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to 
a sympathy with European liberty. 6 Aye,’ says 
New York, 4 he made a handsome thing of it, 
enough to make him comfortable for life.’ 

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable 
and well -conditioned class. If a pickpocket in- 
trude into the society of gentlemen, they exert what 
moral force they have, and he finds himself uncom- 
fortable and glad to get away. But if an adven- 
turer go through all the forms, procure himself to 
be elected to a post of trust, as of senator or presi- 
dent, though by the same arts as we detest in the 
house-thief, — the same gentlemen who agree to 
discountenance the private rogue will be forward 
to show civilities and marks of respect to the pub- 
lic one ; and no amount of evidence of his crimes 
will prevent them giving him ovations, compliment- 
ary dinners, opening their own houses to him and 


WORSHIP. 


203 


priding themselves on his acquaintance. We were 
not deceived by the professions of the private ad- 
venturer, — the louder he talked of his honor, the 
faster we counted our spoons ; but we appeal to 
the sanctified preamble of the messages and proc- 
lamations of the public sinner, as the proof of 
sincerity. It must be that they who pay this hom- 
age have said to themselves, On the whole, we don’t 
know about this that you call honesty ; a bird in 
the hand is better. 

Even well-disposed, good sort of people are 
touched with the same infidelity, and, for brave, 
straightforward action, use half-measures and com- 
promises. Forgetful that a little measure is a 
great error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a 
sharp tool, they go on choosing the dead men of 
routine. But the official men can in nowise help 
you in any question of to-day, they deriving en- 
tirely from the old dead things. Only those can 
help in counsel or conduct who did not make a 
party pledge to defend this or that, but who were 
appointed by God Almighty, before they came into 
the world, to stand for this which they uphold. 

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in 
the leading men is a vice general throughout Amer- 
ican society. But the multitude of the sick shall 
not make us deny the existence of health. In spite 
of our imbecility and terrors, and “universal decay 


204 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


of religion,” &c. &c., the moral sense reappears to- 
day with the same morning newness that has been 
from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. 
You say there is no religion now. ’Tis like saying 
in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that 
moment we are witnessing one of his superlative 
effects. The religion of the cultivated class now, 
to be sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and 
engagements which it was once their religion to 
assume. But this avoidance will yield spontane- 
ous forms in their due hour. There is a principle 
which is the basis of things, which all speech aims 
to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, 
undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very 
peacefully in us, our rightful lord : we are not to 
do, but to let do ; not to work, but to be worked 
upon ; and to this homage there is a consent of all 
thoughtful and just men in all ages and conditions. 
To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlarge- 
ments of power. ’T is remarkable that our faith 
in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it. It 
is the order of the world to educate with accuracy 
the senses and the understanding ; and the enginery 
at work to draw out these powers in priority, no 
doubt has its office. But we are never without a 
hint that these powers are mediate and servile, and 
that we are one day to deal with real being, — es- 
sences witli essences. Even the fury of materia] 


WORSHIP. 


205 


activity has some results friendly to moral health. 
The energetic action of the times develops individ- 
ualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem 
this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals 
with us on no representative system. Souls are not 
saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the man, 

4 How is it with thee ? thee personally ? is it well ? 
is it ill?’ For a great nature it is a happiness to 
escape a religious training, — religion of character 
is so apt to be invaded. Religion must always be 
a crab fruit ; it cannot be grafted and keep its 
wild beauty. “ I have seen,” said a traveller who 
had known the extremes of society, “ I have seen 
human nature in all its forms ; it is everywhere the 
same, but the wilder it is, the more virtuous.” 

We say the old forms of religion decay, and that 
a skepticism devastates the community. I do not 
think it can be cured or stayed by any modification 
of theologic creeds, much less by theologie disci- 
pline. The cure for false theology is mother-wit. 
Forget your books and traditions, and obey your 
moral perceptions at this hour. That which is sig- 
nified by the words “ moral ” and “ spiritual,” is 
a lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we 
have loaded them, will certainly bring back the 
words, age after age, to their ancient meaning. I 
know no words that mean so much. In our defini- 
tions we grope after the spiritual by describing it 


206 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real ; 
that law which executes itself, which works without 
means, and which cannot be conceived as not exist- 
ing. Men talk of “ mere morality,” — which is 
much as if one should say, ‘ Poor God, with nobody 
to help him.’ I find the omnipresence and the al- 
mightiness in the reaction of every atom in Nature. 
I can best indicate by examples those reactions by 
which every part of Nature replies to the purpose 
of the actor, — beneficently to the good, penally to 
the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, 
and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws 
which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern. 

Everyman takes care that his neighbor shall not 
cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to 
care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all 
goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a 
chariot of the sun. What a day dawns when we 
have taken to heart the doctrine of faith ! to pre- 
fer, as a better investment, being to doing ; being 
to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the 
year to the day ; the life to the year ; character to 
performance ; — and have come to know that jus- 
tice will be done us ; and if our genius is slow, 
the term will be long. 

It is certain that worship stands in some com- 
manding relation to the health of man and to his 
highest powers, so as to be in some manner the 


WORSHIP. 


207 


source of intellect. All the great ages have been 
ages of belief. I mean, when there was any ex- 
traordinary power of performance, when great na- 
tional movements began, when arts appeared, when 
heroes existed, when poems were made, — the hu- 
man soul was in earnest, and had fixed its thoughts 
on spiritual verities with as strict a grasp as that 
of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the 
trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of 
the mountains of rectitude ; that all beauty and 
power which men covet are somehow born out of 
that Alpine district; that any extraordinary de- 
gree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral 
charm. Thus I think we very slowly admit in an- 
other man a higher degree of moral sentiment than 
our own, — a finer conscience, more impressionable 
or which marks minuter degrees; an ear to hear 
acuter notes of right and wrong than we can. I 
think we listen suspiciously and very slowly to any 
evidence to that point. But, once satisfied of such 
superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of 
his genius. For such persons are nearer to the se- 
cret of God than others ; are bathed by sweeter 
waters ; they hear notices, they see visions, where 
others are vacant. We believe that holiness con- 
fers a certain insight, because not by our private 
but by our public force can we share and know the 
nature of things. 


208 


CONDUCT OF LIFE.' 


There is an intimate interdependence of intellect 
and morals. Given the equality of two intellects, 
— which will form the most reliable judgments, 
the good, or the bad hearted ? “ The heart has its 

arguments, with which the understanding is not 
acquainted.” For the heart is at once aware of the 
state of health or disease, which is the controlling 
state, that is, — of sanity or of insanity; prior of 
course to all question of the ingenuity of argu- 
ments, the amount of facts, or the elegance of rhet- 
oric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and 
heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. 
The bias of errors of principle carries away men 
into perilous courses as soon as their will does not 
control their passion or talent. Hence the extraor- 
dinary blunders and final wrong head into which 
men spoiled by ambition usually fall. Hence the 
remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the 
cure of crime, is love. “ As much love, so much 
mind,” said the Latin proverb. The superiority 
that has no superior ; the redeemer and instructor 
of souls, as it is their primal essence, is love. 

The moral must be the measure of health. If 
your eye is on the eternal, your intellect will grow, 
and your opinions and actions will have a beauty 
which no learning or combined advantages of other 
men can rival. The moment of your loss of faith 
and acceptance of the lucrative standard will be 


WORSHIP. 


209 


marked in the pause or solstice of genius, the se- 
quent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attrac- 
tion to other minds. The vulgar are sensible of the 
change in you, and of your descent, though they 
clap you on the back and congratulate you on your 
increased common-sense. 

Our recent culture has been in natural science. 
W e have learned the manners of the sun and of the 
moon, of the rivers and the rain, of the mineral 
and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals. 
Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight 
neither loses nor gains. The path of a star, the 
moment of an eclipse, can be determined to the 
fraction of a second. Well, to him the book of 
history, the book of love, the lures of passion and 
the commandments of duty are opened ; and the 
next lesson taught is the continuation of the inflex- 
ible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will 
and of thought; that if in sidereal ages gravity 
and projection keep their craft, and the ball never 
loses its way in its wild path through space, — a 
secreter gravitation, a secreter projection rule not 
less tyrannically in human history, and keep the 
balance of power from age to age unbroken. For 
though the new element of freedom and an indi- 
vidual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms 
are prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, 
are in search of justice, and ultimate right is done. 
14 


VOL. VI. 


210 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see 
this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see that 
against all appearances the nature of things works 
for truth and right forever. 

It is a short sight to limit our faith in laws to 
those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so 
forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose 
them, but push the same geometry and chemistry 
up into the invisible plane of social and rational 
life, so that look where we will, in a boy’s game, 
or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a 
perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward. And 
this appears in a class of facts which concerns all 
men, within and above their creeds. 

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circum- 
stances : it was somebody’s name, or he happened 
to be there at the time, or it was so then and an- 
other day it would have been otherwise. Strong 
men believe in cause and effect. The man was 
born to do it, and his father was born to be the 
father of him and of his deed ; and by looking nar- 
rowly you shall see there was no luck in the mat- 
ter ; but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an 
experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight 
of the moth is preordained, and all things go by 
number, rule, and weight. 

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A 
man does not see that as he eats, so he thinks ; as 


WORSHIP. 


211 

lie deals, so lie is, and so lie appears ; he does' not 
see that his son is the son of his thoughts and 
of his actions ; that fortunes are not exceptions 
but fruits ; that relation and connection are not 
somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and al- 
ways ; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, — 
but method, and an even web ; and what comes out, 
that was put in. As we are, so we do ; and as we 
do, so is it done to us ; we are the builders of our 
fortunes ; cant and lying and the attempt to secure 
a good which does not belong to us, are, once for 
all, balked and vain. But, in the human mind, this 
tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of 
the human mind. In us, it is inspiration ; out 
there in Nature we see its fatal strength. We call 
it the moral sentiment. 

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of 
Law, which compares well with any in our Western 
books. “Law it is, which is without name, or 
color, or hands, or feet ; which is smallest of the 
least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing 
all things; which hears without ears, sees with- 
out eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without 
hands.” 

If any reader tax me with using vague and tra- 
ditional phrases, let me suggest to him by a few 
examples what kind of a trust this is, and how real. 
Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that 


212 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the colors are fast, because they are the native col- 
ors of the fleece ; that the globe is a battery, be- 
cause every atom is a magnet ; and that the police 
and sincerity of the Universe are secured by God’s 
delegating his divinity to every particle ; that there 
is no room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice. 

The countryman leaving his native village for 
the first time and going abroad, finds all his habits 
broken up. In a new nation and language, his 
sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost. What ! it is 
not then necessary to the order and existence of so- 
ciety? He misses this, and the commanding eye 
of his neighborhood, which held him to decorum. 
This is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of 
London, of Paris, to young men. But after a little 
experience he makes the discovery that there are 
no large cities, — none large enough to hide in ; 
that the censors of action are as numerous and as 
near in Paris, as in Littleton or Portland ; that the 
gossip is as prompt and vengeful. There is no con- 
cealment, and for each offence a several vengeance ; 
that reaction, or nothing for nothing , or, things 
are as broad as they are long , is not a rule for 
Littleton or Portland, but for the Universe. 

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of vir- 
tue. We are disgusted by gossip, yet it is of 
importance to keep the angels in their proprieties. 
The smallest fly will draw blood, and gossip is a 


WORSHIP. 


213 


weapon impossible to exclude from the privatest, 
highest, selectest. Nature created a police of many 
ranks. God has delegated himself to a million dep- 
uties. From these low external penalties the scale 
ascends. Next' come the resentments, the fears, 
which injustice calls out ; then the false relations 
in which the offender is put to other men ; and the 
reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and 
devastation of his mind. 

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor 
his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will 
characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. 
If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the be- 
holder in that state of mind you had when you 
made it. If you spend for show, on building, or 
gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will 
so appear. We are all physiognomists and pene- 
trators of character, and things themselves are de- 
tective. If you follow the suburban fashion in 
building a sumptuous - looking house for a little 
money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear 
house. There is no privacy that cannot be pene- 
trated. No secret can be kept in the civilized 
world. Society is a masked ball, where every one 
hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. 
If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those 
whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, 
and usually know what he conceals. Is it other- 


214 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


wise if there be some belief or some purpose he 
would bury in his breast ? ’T is as hard to hide as 
fire. He is a strong man who can hold down his 
opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sen- 
tences without disclosing to intelligent ears pre- 
cisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, 
whether in the kingdom of the senses and the un- 
derstanding, or in that of ideas and imagination, 
in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem 
not to see that their opinion of the world is also a 
confession of character. We can only see what we 
are, and if we misbehave we suspect others. The 
fame of Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas a 
Kempis or of Bonaparte, characterizes those who 
give it. As gas-light is found to be the best noc- 
turnal police, so the universe protects itself by piti- 
less publicity. 

Each must be armed — not necessarily with mus- 
ket and pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel 
that he has better muskets and pikes in his en- 
ergy and constancy. To every creature is his own 
weapon, however skilfully concealed from himself, 
a good while. His work is sword and shield. 
Let him accuse none, let him injure none. The 
way to mend the bad world is to create the right 
world. Here is a low political economy plotting to 
cut the throat of foreign competition and establish 
our own ; excluding others by force, or making 


WORSHIP. 


215 


war on them ; or by cunning tariffs giving prefer- 
ence to worse wares of ours. But the real and 
lasting victories are those of peace and not of war. 
The way to conquer the foreign artisan is, not to 
kill him, but to beat his work. And the Crystal 
Palaces and World Fairs, with -their committees 
and prizes on all kinds of industry, are the re- 
sult of this feeling. The American workman who 
strikes ten blows with his hammer whilst the for- 
eign workman only strikes one, is as really van- 
quishing that foreigner as if the blows were aimed 
at and told on his person. I look on that man 
as happy, who, when there is question of success, 
looks into his work for a reply, not into the market, 
not into opinion, not into patronage. In every va- 
riety of human employment, in the mechanical and 
in the fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in legis- 
lating, there are, among the numbers who do their 
task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and 
as badly as they dare, — there are the working- 
men, on whom the burden of the business falls ; 
those who love work, and love to see it rightly 
done ; who finish their task for its own sake ; and 
the state and the world is happy that has the most 
of such finishers. The world will always do justice 
at last to such finishers ; it cannot otherwise. He 
who has acquired the ability may wait securely the 
occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and 


216 CONDUCT OF LIFE . 

know that it will not loiter. Men talk as if vic- 
tory were something fortunate. Work is victory. 
Wherever work is done, victory is obtained. There 
is no chance, and no blanks. You want but one 
verdict ; if you have your own you are secure of 
the rest. And yet, if witnesses are wanted, wit- 
nesses are near. There was never a man born so 
wise or good but one or more companions came 
into the world with him, who delight in his faculty 
and report it. I cannot see without awe that no 
man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the 
divine assessors who came up with him into life, 
— now under one disguise, now under another, 
like a police in citizens’ clothes, — walk with him, 
step for step, through all the kingdom of time. 

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of 
all things. To make our word or act sublime, we 
must make it real. It is our system that counts, 
not the single word or unsupported action. Use 
what language you will, you can never say any- 
thing but what you are. What I am and what I 
think is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts to 
hold it back. What I am has been secretly con- 
veyed from me to another, whilst I was vainly 
making up my mind to tell him it. He has heard 
from me what I never spoke. 

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for 
sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled 


WORSHIP. 


217 


or amused. In the progress of the character, there 
is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and 
a decreasing faith in propositions. Young people 
admire talents and particular excellences. As we 
grow older we value total powers and effects, as 
the spirit or quality of the man. We have another 
sight, and a new standard ; an insight which disre- 
gards what is done for the eye, and pierces to the 
doer ; an ear which hears not what men say, but 
hears what they do not say. 

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in 
the Catholic Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom 
many anecdotes touching his discernment and be- 
nevolence are told at Naples and Rome. Among 
the nuns in a convent not far from Rome, one had 
appeared who laid claim to certain rare gifts of 
inspiration and prophecy, and the abbess advised 
the Holy Father at Rome of the wonderful powers 
shown by her novice. The Pope did not well know 
what to make of these new claims, and Philip com- 
ing in from a journey one day, he consulted him. 
Philip undertook to visit the nun and ascertain 
her character. He threw himself on his mule, all 
travel-soiled as he was, and hastened through the 
mud and mire to the distant convent. He told the 
abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her 
to summon the nun without delay. The nun was 
sent for, and as soon as she came into the apart- 


218 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


ment, Philip stretched out his leg, all bespattered 
with mud, and desired her to draw off his boots. 
The young nun, who had become the object of much 
attention and respect, drew back with anger, and 
refused the office : Philip ran out of doors, mounted 
his mule and returned instantly to the Pope ; 
“ Give yourself no uneasiness, Holy Father, any 
longer : here is no miracle, for here is no humility.” 

We need not much mind what people please to 
say, but what they must say; what their natures 
say, though their busy, artful, Yankee understand- 
ings try to hold back and choke that word, and 
to articulate something different. If we will sit 
quietly, what they ought to say is said, with their 
will or against their will. We do not care for 
you, let us pretend what we may : — we are always 
looking through you to the dim dictator behind you. 
Whilst your habit or whim chatters, we civilly and 
impatiently wait until that wise superior shall speak 
again. Even children are not deceived by the false 
reasons which their parents give in answer to their 
questions, whether touching natural facts, or relig- 
ion, or persons. When the parent, instead of 
thinking how it really is, puts them off with a 
traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children 
perceive that it is traditional or hypocritical. To a 
sound constitution the defect of another is at once 
manifest ; and the marks of it are only concealed 


WORSHIP. 


219 


from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical 
observer remarks tbat the sympathies of the chest, 
abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on the face, and 
on all its features. Not only does our beauty 
waste, but it leaves word how it went to waste. 
Physiognomy and phrenology are not new sciences, 
but declarations of the soul that it is aware of 
certain new sources of information. And now 
sciences of broader scope are starting up behind 
these. And so for ourselves it is really of little 
importance what blunders in statement we make, 
so only we make no wilful departures from the 
truth. How a man’s truth comes to mind, long 
after we have forgotten all his words ! How it 
comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our only 
armor in all passages of life and death ! Wit is 
cheap, and anger is cheap ; but if you cannot argue 
or explain yourself to the other party, cleave to 
the truth, against me against thee, and you gain a 
station from which you cannot be dislodged. The 
other party will forget the words that you spoke, 
but the part you took continues to plead for you. 

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which 
life offers me ? I am well assured that the Ques- 
tioner who brings me so many problems will bring 
the answers also in due time. Yery rich, very po- 
tent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have it 
all his own way, for me. Why should I give up 


220 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


my thought, because I cannot answer an objection 
to it ? Consider only whether it remains in my 
life the same it was. That only which we have 
within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, 
it is because we harbor none. If there is grand- 
eur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and 
sweeps. He only is rightly immortal to whom all 
things are immortal. I have read somewhere that 
none is accomplished so long as any are incom- 
plete ; that the happiness of one cannot consist with 
the misery of any other. 

The Buddhists say, “ No seed will die : ” every 
seed will grow. Where is the service which can 
escape its remuneration ? What is vulgar, and the 
essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward ? 
? T is the difference of artisan and artist, of talent 
and genius, of sinner and saint. The man whose 
eyes are nailed, not on the nature of his act but on 
the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, 
is almost equally low. He is great whose eyes are 
opened to see that the reward of actions cannot be 
escaped, because he is transformed into his action, 
and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, 
like every other tree. A great man cannot be hin- 
dered of the effect of his act, because it is immedi- 
ate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, 
and in the dark brings them friends from far. 
Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they 
walk in hallowed cathedrals. 


WORSHIP. 


221 


And so I look on those sentiments which make 
the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, 
as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms ; 
and that as soon as the man is right, assurances 
and previsions emanate from the interior of his 
body and his mind ; as, when flowers reach their 
ripeness, incense exhales from them, and as a 
beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet 
by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and 
soils. 

Thus man is made equal to every event. He 
can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, 
painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or 
pestilence, with duty for his guide. He feels the 
insurance of a just employment. I am not afraid 
of accident as long as I am in my place. It is 
strange that superior persons should not feel that 
they have some better resistance against cholera 
than avoiding green peas and salads. Life is hardly 
respectable, — is it ? if it has no generous, guaran- 
teeing task, no duties or affections that constitute 
a necessity of existing. Every man’s task is his 
life-preserver. The conviction that his work is dear 
to God and cannot be spared, defends him. The 
lightning-rod that disarms the cloud of its threat 
is his body in its duty. A high aim reacts on 
the means, on the days, on the organs of the 
body. A high aim is curative, as well as arnica. 


222 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


“ Napoleon,” says Goethe, “ visited those sick of 
the plague, in order to prove that the man who 
could vanquish fear could vanquish the plague 
also ; and he was right. It is incredible what 
force the will has in such cases : it penetrates the 
body and puts it in a state of activity which re- 
pels all hurtful influences ; whilst fear invites 
them.” 

It is related of William of Orange, that whilst 
he was besieging a town on the continent, a gen- 
tleman sent to him on public business came to his 
camp, and, learning that the King was before the 
walls, he ventured to go where he was. He found 
him directing the operation of his gunners, and 
having explained his errand and received his an- 
swer, the King said, “ Do you not know, sir, that 
every moment you spend here is at the risk of your 
life?” “ I run no more risk,” replied the gentle- 
man, “ than your Majesty.” “ Yes,” said the King, 
“ but my duty brings me here, and yours does not.” 
In a few minutes a cannon-ball fell on the spot, and 
the gentleman was killed. 

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the 
warnings of his early instinct, under the guidance 
of a deeper instinct. He learns to welcome mis- 
fortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of 
the great. He learns the greatness of humility. 
He shall work in the dark, work against failure, 


WORSHIP. 


223 

pain, and ill-will. If he is insulted, he can be 
insulted ; all his affair is not to insult. Hafiz 
writes, — 

“At the last clay, men shall wear 
On their heads the dust, 

As ensign and as ornament 
Of their lowly trust.” 

The moral equalizes all ; enriches, empowers all. 
It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in 
their pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the 
slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. 
In the greatest destitution and calamity it surprises 
man with a feeling of elasticity which makes noth- 
ing of loss. 

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose 
life and discourse betrayed many inspirations of 
this sentiment. Benedict was always great in the 
present time. He had hoarded nothing from the 
past, neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory. 
He had no designs on the future, neither for what 
he should do to men, nor for what men should do 
for him. He said, “ I am never beaten until I know 
that I am beaten. I meet powerful brutal people 
to whom I have no skill to reply. They think they 
have defeated me. It is so published in society, in 
the journals ; I am defeated in this fashion, in all 
men’s sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines. My 
ledger may show that I am in debt, cannot yet make 


224 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


my ends meet and vanquish the enemy so. My 
race may not be prospering ; we are sick, ugly, 
obscure, unpopular. My children may be worsted. 
I seem to fail in my friends and clients, too. That 
is to say, in all the encounters that have yet 
chanced, I have not been weaponed for that par- 
ticular occasion, and have been historically beaten ; 
and yet I know all the time that I have never 
been beaten ; have never yet fought, shall certainly 
fight when my hour comes, and shall beat.” “ A 
man,” says the Vishnu Sarma, “ who having well 
compared his own strength or weakness with that 
of others, after all doth not know the difference, is 
easily overcome by his enemies.” 

“ I spent,” he said, “ ten months in the coun- 
try. Thick-starred Orion was my only companion. 
Wherever a squirrel or a bee can go with security, 
I can go. I ate whatever was set before me; I 
touched ivy and dogwood. When I went abroad, 
I kept company with every man on the road, for I 
knew that my evil and my good did not come from 
these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was. 
For I could not stoop to be a circumstance, as they 
did who put their life into their fortune and their 
company. I would not degrade myself by casting 
about in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting 
for one. If the thought come, I would give it 
entertainment. It should, as it ought, go into my 


WORSHIP. 


225 


hands and feet ; but if it come not spontaneously, 
it comes not rightly at all. If it can spare me, I 
am sure I can spare it. It shall be the same with 
my friends. I will never woo the loveliest. I will 
not ask any friendship or favor. When I come to 
my own, we shall both know it. Nothing will be to 
be asked or to be granted.” Benedict went out to 
seek his friend, and met him on the way ; but he 
expressed no surprise at any coincidences. On the 
other hand, if he called at the door of his friend 
and he was not at home, he did not go again ; 
concluding that he had misinterpreted the intima- 
tions. 

He had the whim not to make an apology to the 
same individual whom he had wronged. For this 
he said was a piece of personal vanity ; but he 
would correct his conduct, in that respect in which 
he had faulted, to the next person he should meet. 
Thus, he said, universal justice was satisfied. 

Mira came to ask what she should do with the 
poor Genesee woman who had hired herself to 
work for her, at a shilling a day, and, now sick- 
ening, was like to be bedridden on her hands. 
Should she keep her, or should she dismiss her? 
But Benedict said, “ Why ask ? One thing will 
clear itself as the thing to be done, and not an- 
other, when the hour comes. Is it a question 
whether to put her into the street ? J ust as much 

VOL. VI. 15 


226 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


whether to thrust the little J enny on your arm into 
the street. The milk and meal you give the beg- 
gar will fatten Jenny. Thrust the woman out, and 
you thrust your babe out of doors, whether it so 
seem to you or not.” 

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of be- 
lief, in the doctrine which they faithfully hold that 
encourages them to open their doors to every way- 
faring man who proposes to come among them ; for, 
they say, the Spirit will presently manifest to the 
man himself and to the society what manner of 
person he is, and whether he belongs among them. 
They do not receive him, they do not reject him. 
And not in vain have they worn their clay coat, 
and drudged in their fields, and shuffled in their 
Bruin dance, from year to year, if they have truly 
learned thus much wisdom. 

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory ; him 
who, by sympathy with the invisible and real, finds 
support in labor, instead of praise ; who does not 
shine, and would rather not. With eyes open, he 
makes the choice of virtue which outrages the vir- 
tuous ; of religion which churches stop their dis- 
cords to burn and exterminate ; for the highest 
virtue is always against the law. 

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the 
arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but 
moderately. The great class, they who affect our 


WORSHIP. 


227 


imagination, the men who could not make their 
hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, 
the fools of ideas, — they suggest what they can- 
not execute. They speak to the ages, and are 
heard from afar. The Spirit does not love cripples 
and malformations. If there ever was a good man, 
be certain there was another and will be more. 

And so in relation to that future hour, that spec- 
tre clothed with beauty at our curtain by night, at 
our table by day, — the apprehension, the assur- 
ance of a coming change. The race of mankind 
have always offered at least this implied thanks for 
the gift of existence, — namely, the terror of its 
being taken away ; the insatiable curiosity and ap- 
petite for its continuation. The whole revelation 
that is vouchsafed us is the gentle trust, which, in 
our experience we find will cover also with flowers 
the slopes of this chasm. 

Of immortality, the soul when well employed is 
incurious. It is so well, that it is sure it will be 
well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. 
The son of Antioehus asked his father when he 
would join battle ? “ Dost thou fear,” replied the 

King, “ that thou only in all the army wilt not 
hear the trumpet ? ” ’T is a higher thing to con- 
fide that if it is best we should live, we shall live, 
— ’t is higher to have this conviction, than to have 
the lease of indefinite centuries and millenniums and 


228 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


seons. Higher than the question of our duration is 
the question of our deserving. Immortality will 
come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be 
a great soul in future, must be a great soul now. 
It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that 
is, on any man’s exjDerience but our own. It must 
be proved, if at all, from our own activity and 
designs, which imply an interminable future for 
their play. 

What is called religion effeminates and demoral- 
izes. Such as you are, the gods themselves could 
not help you. Men are too often unfit to live, from 
their obvious inequality to their own necessities ; or 
they suffer from politics, or bad neighbors, or from 
sickness, and they would gladly know that they 
were to be dismissed from the duties of life. But 
the wise instinct asks, ‘ How will death help them ? ’ 
These are not dismissed when they die. You shall 
not wish for death out of pusillanimity. The weight 
of the Universe is pressed down on the shoulders of 
each moral agent to hold him to his task. The 
only path of escape known in all the worlds of God 
is performance. You must do your work, before 
you shall be released. And as far as it is a ques- 
tion of fact respecting the government of the Uni- 
verse, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a 
word, “ It is pleasant to die if there be gods, and 
sad to live if there be none.” 


WORSHIP. 


229 


And so I think that the last lesson of life, the 
choral song which rises from all elements and all 
angels, is a voluntary obedience, a necessitated 
freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the 
world is, he shares the same impressions, predispo- 
sitions, and destiny. When his mind is illumi- 
nated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself 
joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with 
knowledge, what the stones do by structure. 

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the pres- 
ent and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be 
intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith 
which is science. “ There are two things,” said 
Mahomet, “ which I abhor, the learned in his infi- 
delities, and the fool in his devotions.” Our times 
are impatient of both, and specially of the last. 
Let us have nothing now which is not its own evi- 
dence. There is surely enough for the heart and 
imagination in the religion itself. Let us not be 
pestered with assertions and half-truths, with emo- 
tions and snuffle. 

There will be a new church founded on moral 
science ; at first cold and naked, a babe in a man- 
ger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical 
law, the church of men to come, without shawms, 
or psaltery, or sackbut ; but it will have heaven 
and earth for its beams and rafters; science for 
symbol and illustration ; it will fast enough gather 


280 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoi- 
cism so stern and exigent as tliis shall be. It shall 
send man home to his central solitude, shame these 
social, supplicating manners, and make him know 
that much of the time he must have himself to his 
friend. He shall expect no co-operation, he shall 
walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, 
the nameless Power, the super-personal Heart, — 
he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his 
own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame 
can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers, the 
good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he 
have kept them, they animate him with the leading 
of great duty, and an endless horizon. Honor and 
fortune exist to him who always recognizes the 
neighborhood of the great, — always feels himself 
in the presence of high causes. 


VII. 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 


Hear what British Merlin sung, 

Of keenest eye and truest tongue. 

Say not, the chiefs who first arrive 
Usurp the seats for which all strive ; 

The forefathers this land who found 
Failed to plant the vantage-ground ; 

Ever from one who comes to-morrow 
Men wait their good and truth to borrow. 

But wilt thou measure all thy road, 

See thou lift the lightest load. 

"Who has little, to him who has less, can spare, 
And thou, Cyndy Han’s son ! beware 
Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear, 

To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, — 

Only the light-armed climb the hill. 

The richest of all lords is Use, 

And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse. 

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, 

Drink the wild air’s salubrity : 

Where the star Canope shines in May, 
Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay. 


232 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


The music that can deepest reach, 
And cure all ill, is cordial speech : 
Mask thy wisdom with delight, 

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white. 
Of all wit’s uses, the main one 
Is to live well with who has none. 
Cleave to thine acre ; the round year 
Will fetch all fruits and virtues here : 
Fool and foe may harmless roam, 
Loved and lovers bide at home. 

A day for toil, an hour for sport, 

But for a friend is life too short. 




CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 


Although this garrulity of advising is born with 
us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder 
than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresist- 
ible dictation from temperament and unknown in- 
spiration enters into it, that we doubt we can say 
anything out of our own experience whereby to 
help each other. All the professions are timid 
and expectant agencies. The priest is glad if his 
prayers or his sermon meet the condition of any 
soul ; if of two, if of ten, ’t is a signal success. But 
he walked to the church without any assurance 
that he knew the distemper, or could heal it. The 
physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few 
resources the same tonic or sedative to this new and 
peculiar constitution which he has applied with 
various success to a hundred men before. If the 
patient mends he is glad and surprised. The law- 
yer advises the client, and tells his story to the 
jury and leaves it with them, and is as gay and as 
much relieved as the client if it turns out that he 
has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments 
and puts a brave face on the matter, and, since 


234 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


there must be a decision, decides as he can, and 
hopes he has done justice and given satisfaction to 
the community ; but is only an advocate after 
all. And so is all life a timid and unskilful spec- 
tator. We do what we must, and call it by the 
best names. We like very well to be praised for 
our action, but our conscience says, “ Not unto us.” 
’Tis little we can do for each other. We accom- 
pany the youth with sympathy and manifold old 
sayings of the wise to the gate of the arena, but 
’tis certain that not by strength of ours, or of the 
old sayings, but only on strength of his own, un- 
known to us or to any, he must stand or fall. That 
by which a man conquers in any passage is a pro- 
found secret to every other being in the world, and 
it is only as he turns his back on us and on all 
men and draws on this most private wisdom, that 
any good can come to him. What we have there- 
fore to say of life, is rather description, or if you 
please, celebration, than available rules. 

Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us 
either think or feel strongly, adds to our power 
and enlarges our field of action. We have a debt 
to every great heart, to every fine genius ; to those 
who have put life and fortune on the cast of an 
act of justice ; to those who have added new sci- 
ences; to those who have refined life by elegant 
pursuits. ’Tis the fine souls who serve us, and 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 285 


not what is called fine society. Fine society is 
only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the 
street and the tavern. Fine society, in the common 
acceptation, has neither ideas nor aims. It ren- 
ders the service of a perfumery or a laundry, not 
of a farm or factory. ’T is an exclusion and a 
precinct. Sydney Smith said, “ A few yards in 
London cement or dissolve friendship.” It is an 
unprincipled decorum ; an affair of clean linen and 
coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance in trifles. 
There are other measures of self-respect for a man 
than the number of clean shirts he puts on every 
day. Society wishes to be amused. I do not wish 
to be amused. I wish that life should not be cheap, 
but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, 
loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank- 
days, by some debt which is to be paid us or which 
we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste. 
Is all we have to do to draw the breath in and 
blow it out again? Porphyry’s definition is bet- 
ter; “Life is that which holds matter together.” 
The babe in arms is a channel through which the 
energies we call fate, love and reason, visibty stream. 
See what a cometary train of auxiliaries man car- 
ries with him, of animals, plants, stones, gases and 
imponderable elements. Let us infer his ends 
from this pomp of means. Mirabeau said, “ Why 
should we feel ourselves to be men, unless it be to 


236 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


succeed in everything, everywhere. You must say 
of nothing, That is beneath me, nor feel that any- 
thing can be out of your power. Nothing is im- 
possible to the man who can will. Is that neces- 
sary t That shall be : — this is the only law of 
success.” Whoever said it, this is in the right 
key. But this is not the tone and genius of the 
men in the street. In the streets we grow cynical. 
The men we meet are coarse and torpid. The 
finest wits have their sediment. What quantities 
of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures, antiquaries, 
politicians, thieves, and triflers of both sexes, might 
be advantageously spared ! Mankind divides it- 
self into two classes, — benefactors and malefac- 
tors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. 
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are 
animated with a faint hope that he will die : — 
quantities of poor lives, of distressing invalids, of 
cases for a gun. Franklin said, “ Mankind are 
very superficial and dastardly : they begin upon a 
thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from 
it discouraged ; but they have capacities, if they 
would employ them.” Shall we then judge a coun- 
try by the majority, or by the minority? By the 
minority, surely. ? Tis pedantry to estimate na- 
tions by the census, or by square miles of land, or 
other than by their importance to the mind of the 
time. 


CONSIDERATIONS BY TEE WAY. 237 

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. 
Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their 
demands and influence, and need not to be flattered 
but to be schooled. I wish not to concede any- 
thing to them, but to tame, drill, divide and break 
them up, and draw individuals out of them. The 
worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to 
preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the 
calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass 
at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accom- 
plished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow- 
brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazza- 
roni at all. If government knew how, I should 
like to see it check, not multiply the population. 
When it reaches its true law of action, every man 
that is born will be hailed as essential. Away with 
this hurrah of masses, and let us have the consid- 
erate vote of single men spoken on their honor and 
their conscience. In old Egypt it was established 
law that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to 
a hundred hands. I think it was much under-esti- 
mated. “ Clay and clay differ in dignity,” as we 
discover by our preferences every day. What a 
vicious practice is this of our politicians at Wash- 
ington pairing off ! as if one man who votes wrong 
going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote 
right, for going away ; or as if your presence did 
not tell in more ways than in your vote. Suppose 


238 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


the three hundred heroes at Thermopylae had paired 
off with three hundred Persians ; would it have 
been all the same to Greece, and to history ? Na- 
poleon was called by his men Cent Mille. Add 
honesty to him, and they might have called him 
Hundred Million. 

Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that 
is good, and shakes down a tree full of gnarled, 
wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen 
dessert apples ; and she scatters nations of naked 
Indians and nations of clothed Christians, with two 
or three good heads among them. Nature works 
very hard, and only hits the white once in a million 
throws. In mankind she is contented if she yields 
one master in a century. The more difficulty there 
is in creating good men, the more they are used 
when they come. I once counted in a little neigh- 
borhood and found that every able-bodied man had 
say from twelve to fifteen persons dependent on 
him for material aid, — to whom he is to be for 
spoon and jug, for backer and sponsor, for nursery 
and hospital and many functions beside : nor does 
it seem to make much difference whether he is 
bachelor or patriarch ; if he do not violently de- 
cline the duties that fall to him, this amount of 
helpfulness will in one way or another be brought 
home to him. This is the tax which his abilities 
pay. The good men are employed for private cen« 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 239 


tres of use, and for larger influence. All reve- 
lations, whether of mechanical or intellectual or 
moral science, are made, not to communities but to 
single persons. All the marked events of our day, 
all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced 
back to their origin in a private brain. All the 
feats which make our civility were the thoughts of 
a few good heads. 

Meantime this spawning productivity is not nox- 
ious or needless. You would say this rabble of 
nations might be spared. But no, they are all 
counted and depended on. Fate keeps everything 
alive so long as the smallest thread of public neces- 
sity holds it on to the tree. The coxcomb and 
bully and thief class are allowed as proletaries, 
every one of their vices being the excess or acridity 
of a virtue. The mass are animal, in pupilage, and 
near chimpanzee. But the units whereof this mass 
is composed, are neuters, every one of which may 
be grown to a queen-bee. The rule is, we are used 
as brute atoms until we think : then we use all the 
rest. Nature turns all malfeasance to good. Na- 
ture provided for real needs. No sane man at last 
distrusts himself. His existence is a perfect an- 
swer to all sentimental cavils. If he is, he is 
wanted, and has the precise properties that are 
required. That we are here, is proof we ought 
to be here. We have as good right, and the same 


240 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy 
Hook have to be there. 

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no 
malice, no bad heart in the observer, but simply 
that the majority are unripe, and have not yet 
come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion. 
That, if they knew it, is an oracle for them and for 
all. But in the passing moment the quadruped in- 
terest is very prone to prevail ; and this beast-force, 
whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the 
school of heroes, the glory of martyrs, has provoked 
in every age the satire of wits and the tears of 
good men. They find the journals, the clubs, the 
governments, the churches, to be in the interest and 
the pay of the devil. And wise men have met this 
obstruction in their times, like Socrates, with his 
famous irony ; like Bacon, with life-long dissimula- 
tion ; like Erasmus, with his book “ The Praise of 
Folly ; ” like Rabelais, with his satire rending the 
nations. “ They were the fools who cried against 
me, you will say,” wrote the Chevalier de Bouffiers 
to Grimm ; “ aye, but the fools have the advantage 
of numbers, and ’t is that which decides. It is of 
no use for us to make war with them ; we shall not 
weaken them ; they will always be the masters. 
There will not be a practice or an usage introduced, 
of which they are not the authors.” 

In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 241 

history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor 
but Bad is sometimes a better. The oppressions 
of William the Norman, savage forest -laws and 
crushing despotism made possible the inspirations 
of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted 
money, armies, castles, and as much as he could 
get. It was necessary to call the people together 
by shorter, swifter ways, — and the House of Com- 
mons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privi- 
leges. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign he 
decreed “ that no tax should be levied without con- 
sent of Lords and Commons ; ” — which is the 
basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch af- 
firms that the cruel wars which followed the march 
of Alexander introduced the civility, language, and 
arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced 
marriage ; built seventy cities, and united hostile na- 
tions under one government. The barbarians who 
broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day 
too soon. Schiller says the Thirty Years’ War 
made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots 
serve men immensely, as Henry VIII. in the con- 
test with the Pope ; as the infatuations no less than 
the wisdom of Cromwell ; as the ferocity of the 
Russian czars ; as the fanaticism of the French reg- 
icides of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest 
of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by de- 
stroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, 
16 


VOL. VI. 


242 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the 
ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and 
open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency 
in things to right themselves, and the war or revo- 
lution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, 
allows things to take a new and natural order. The 
sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which 
makes the errors of planets and the fevers and dis- 
tempers of men, self -limiting. Nature is upheld by 
antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are edu- 
cators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. 
Without war, no soldiers ; without enemies, no hero. 
The sun were insipid, if the universe were not 
opaque. And the glory of character is in affront- 
ing the horrors of depravity to draw thence new 
nobilities of power ; as Art lives and thrills in new 
use and combining of contrasts, and mining into 
the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. What 
would painter do, or what would poet or saint, but 
for crucifixions and hells? And evermore in the 
world is this marvellous balance of beauty and dis- 
gust, magnificence and rats. Not Antoninus, but a 
poor washer- woman said, “ The more trouble, the 
more lion ; that ’s my principle.” 

I do not think very respectfully of the designs or 
the doings of the people who went to California in 
1849. It was a rush and a scramble of needy ad- 
venturers, and, in the western country, a general 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 243 

jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers. Some 
of them went with honest purposes, some with very 
bad ones, and all of them with the very common- 
place wish to find a short way to wealth. But 
Nature watches over all, and turns this malfeasance 
to good. California gets peopled and subdued, 
civilized in this immoral way, and on this fiction 
a real prosperity is rooted and grown. ’T is a de- 
coy-duck ; ’t is tubs thrown to amuse the whale ; 
but real ducks, and whales that yield oil, are caught. 
And out of Sabine rapes, and out of robbers’ forays, 
real Romes and their heroisms come in fulness of 
time. 

In America the geography is sublime but the 
men are not : the inventions are excellent but the 
inventors one is sometimes ashamed of. The agen- 
cies by which events so grand as the opening of 
California, of Texas, of Oregon, and the junction 
of the two oceans, are effected, are paltry, — coarse 
selfishness, fraud and conspiracy ; and most of the 
great results of history are brought about by dis- 
creditable means. 

The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great 
West from railroads is inestimable, and vastly ex- 
ceeding any intentional philanthropy on recdrd. 
What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, 
or by a Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, 
or Florence Nightingale, or any lover, less or 


244 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


larger, compared with the involuntary "blessing 
wrought on nations by the selfish capitalists who 
built the Illinois, Michigan, and the network of the 
Mississippi-valley roads ; which have evoked not 
only all the wealth of the soil, but the energy of 
millions of men. It is a sentence of ancient wis- 
dom that “ God hangs the greatest weights on the 
smallest wires.” 

What happens thus to nations, befalls every day 
in private houses. When the friends of a gentle- 
man brought to his notice the follies of his sons, 
with many hints of their danger, he replied that he 
knew so much mischief when he was a boy, and 
had turned out on the whole so successfully, that 
he was not alarmed by the dissipation of boys ; 
’t was dangerous water, but he thought they would 
soon touch bottom, and then swim to the top. This 
is bold practice, and there are many failures to a 
good escape. Yet one would say that a good un- 
derstanding would suffice as well as moral sensibil- 
ity to keep one erect ; the gratifications of the pas- 
sions are so quickly seen to be damaging, and — 
what men like least — seriously lowering them in 
social rank. Then all talent sinks with character. 

“ Croycz moi , Verreur aussi a son mSrite ,” said 
Yoltaire. We see those who surmount, by dint of 
some egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which 
the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 245 

narrow man, who, because he does not see many 
things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggera- 
tion, and if he falls among other narrow men, or 
on objects which have a brief importance, as some 
trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it to the 
universe, and seems inspired and a godsend to 
those who wish to magnify the matter and carry 
a point. Better, certainly, if we could secure the 
strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring 
into society, quite clear of their vices. But who 
dares draw out the linchpin from the wagon-wheel? 
’T is so manifest that there is no moral deformity 
but is a good passion out of place ; that there is no 
man who is not indebted to his foibles ; that, ac- 
cording to the old oracle, “the Furies are the bonds 
of men ; ” that the poisons are our principal med- 
icines, which kill the disease and save the life. In 
the high prophetic phrase, He causes the wrath of 
man to 'praise him , and twists and wrenches our 
evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote, — 

“ ’T is said, best men are moulded of tbeir faults ; ” 

and great educators and lawgivers, and especially 
generals and leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this 
stuff, and esteem men of irregular and passional 
force the best timber. A man of sense and energy, 
the late head of the Farm School in Boston Har- 
bor, said to me, “ I want none of your good boys, — 


246 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


give me the bad ones.” And this is the reason, I 
suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the 
mothers are scared, and think they are going to 
die. Mirabeau said, “ There are none but men of 
strong passions capable of going to greatness ; none 
but such capable of meriting the public gratitude.” 
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful 
spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to 
deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: 
’t is the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, 
overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds and 
first addresses in society, and gives us a good start 
and speed, easy to continue when once it is begun. 
In short there is no man who is not at some time 
indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed 
from manures. We only insist that the man melio- 
rate, and that the plant grow upward and convert 
the base into the better nature. 

The wise workman will not regret the poverty or 
the solitude which brought out his working talents. 
The youth is charmed with the fine air and accom- 
plishments of the children of fortune. But all 
great men come out of the middle classes. ’T is 
better for the head ; ’t is better for the heart. 
Marcus Antoninus says that Fronto told him that 
“the so-called high-born are for the most part 
heartless ; ” whilst nothing is so indicative of deep- 
est culture as a tender consideration of the ijmo * 


CONSIDERATIONS BY TIIE WAY. 247 

rant. Charles James Fox said of England, “The 
history of this country proves that we are not to 
expect from men in affluent circumstances the vig- 
ilance, energy, and exertion without which the 
House of Commons would lose its greatest force 
and weight. Human nature is prone to indul- 
gence, and the most meritorious public services 
have always been performed by persons in a con- 
dition of life removed from opulence.” And yet 
what we ask daily, is to be conventional. Supply, 
most kind gods ! this defect in my address, in my 
form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out 
of the ring : supply it, and let me be like the rest 
whom I admire, and on good terms with them. 
But the wise gods say, No, we have better things 
for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of 
sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider 
truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. 
A Fifth-Avenue landlord, a W est-End householder, 
is not the highest style of man ; and though good 
hearts and sound minds are of no condition, yet he 
who is to be wise for many must not be protected. 
He must know the huts where poor men lie, and 
the chores which poor men do. The first-class 
minds, HDsop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakspeare, 
Franklin, had the poor man’s feeling and mortifi- 
cation. A rich man was never insulted in his life ; 
but this man must be stung. A rich man was 


248 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


never in danger from cold, or hunger, or war, or 
ruffians, — and you can see he was not, from the 
moderation of his ideas. ’T is a fatal disadvantage 
to be cockered and to eat too much cake. What 
tests of manhood could he stand ? Take him out 
of his protections. He is a good book-keeper ; or 
he is a shrewd adviser in the insurance office ; per- 
haps he could pass a college examination, and take 
his degrees ; perhaps he can give wise counsel in 
a court of law. Now plant him down among far- 
mers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a dog 
on him ; set a highwayman on him ; try him with 
a course of mobs ; send him to Kansas, to Pike’s 
Peak, to Oregon ; and, if he have true faculty, this 
may be the element he wants, and he will come 
out of it with broader wisdom and manly power. 
-ZEsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken 
by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know 
the realities of human life. 

Bad times have a scientific value. These are 
occasions a good learner would not miss. As we 
go gladly to Faneuil Hall to be played upon by 
the stormy winds and strong fingers of enraged pa- 
triotism, so is a fanatical persecution, civil war, 
national bankruptcy or revolution more rich in the 
central tones than languid years of prosperity. 
What had been, ever since our memory, solid con- 
tinent, yawns apart and discloses its composition 


CONSIDER A TIONS BY TEE WAY. 249 


and genesis. We learn geology the morning after 
the earthquake, on gliastly diagrams of cloven moun- 
tains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea. 

In our life and culture everything is worked 
up and comes in use, — passion, war, revolt, bank- 
ruptcy, and not less, folly and blunders, insult, en- 
nui and bad company. Nature is a rag-merchant, 
who works up every shred and ort and end into 
new creations ; like a good chemist whom I found 
the other day in his laboratory, converting his old 
shirts into pure white sugar. Life is a boundless 
privilege, and when you pay for your ticket and 
get into the car, you have no guess what good com- 
pany you shall find there. You buy much that is 
not rendered in the bill. Men achieve a certain 
greatness unawares, when working to another aim. 

If now in this connection of discourse we should 
venture on laying down the first obvious rules of 
life, I will not here repeat the first rule of economy, 
already propounded once and again, that every 
man shall maintain himself, — but I will say, get 
health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor 
exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For 
sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life 
and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own 
sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, 
distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of 
what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, 


250 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with mean- 
ness and mopings and with ministration to its vorac- 
ity of trifles. Dr. Johnson said severely, “Every 
man is a rascal as soon as he is sick.” Drop the 
cant, and treat it sanely. In dealing with the 
drunken, we do not affect to be drunk. We must 
treat the sick with the same firmness, giving them 
of course every aid, — but withholding ourselves. 
I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who 
were his companions ? what men of ability he saw ? 
He replied that he spent his time with the sick and 
the dying. I said he seemed to me to need quite 
other company, and all the more that he had this ; 
for if people were sick and dying to any purpose, 
we would leave all and go to them, but as far as I 
had observed they were as frivolous as the rest, and 
sometimes much more frivolous. Let us engage 
our companions not to spare us. I knew a wise 
woman who said to her friends, “ When I am old, 
rule me.” And the best part of health is fine dis- 
position. It is more essential than talent, even in 
the works of talent. Nothing will supply the want 
of sunshine to peaches, and to make knowledge val- 
uable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. 
Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are nour- 
ished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. 
All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius 
works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last; 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 251 

and for tlie reason that whoever sees the law which 
distributes things, does not despond, but is ani- 
mated to great desires and endeavors. He who de- 
sponds betrays, that he has not seen it. 

’T is a Dutch proverb that “ paint costs noth- 
ing,” such are its preserving qualities in damp cli- 
mates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pig- 
ment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, 
the more it is spent, the more of it remains. The 
latent heat of an ounce of wood or stone is inex- 
haustible. You may rub the same chip of pine to 
the point of kindling a hundred times ; and the 
power of happiness of any soul is not to be com- 
puted or drained. It is observed that a depression 
of spirits develops the germs of a plague in individ- 
uals and nations. 

It is an old commendation of right behavior, 
“ Aliis Icetus, sapiens sibi ,” which our English 
proverb translates, “ Be merry and wise.” I know 
how easy it is to men of the world to look grave 
and sneer at your sanguine youth and its glittering 
dreams. But I find the gayest castles in the air 
that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for 
use than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug 
and caverned out by grumbling, discontented peo- 
ple. I know those miserable fellows, and I hate 
them, who see a black star always riding through 
the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead : 


252 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


waves of light pass over and hide it for a moment, 
but the black star keeps fast in the zenith. But 
power dwells with cheerfulness ; hope puts us in a 
working mood, whilst despair is no muse, and un- 
tunes the active powers. A man should make life 
and Nature happier to us, or he had better never 
been born. When the political economist reckons 
up the unproductive classes, he should put at the 
head this class of pitiers of themselves, cravers of 
sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters. An old 
French verse runs, in my translation : — 

“ Some of your griefs you have cured, 

And the sharpest you still have survived; 

But what torments of pain you endured 
From evils that never arrived ! ” 

There are three wants which never can be satis- 
fied : that of the rich, who wants something more ; 
that of the sick, who wants something different; 
and that of the traveller, who says, 4 Anywhere but 
here.’ The Turkish cadi said to Layard, “ After 
the fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from 
one place to another, until thou art happy and con- 
tent in none.” My countrymen are not less infat- 
uated with the rococo toy of Italy. All America 
seems on the point of embarking for Europe. But 
we shall not always traverse seas and lands with 
light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say. One 
day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 253 


passion for America. Culture will give gravity 
and domestic rest to those who now travel only as 
not knowing how else to spend money. Already, 
who provoke pity like that excellent family party 
just arriving in their well-appointed carriage, as 
far from home and any honest end as ever ? Each 
nation has asked successively, 4 What are they here 
for ? ’ until at last the party are shamefaced, and 
anticipate the question at the gates of each town. 

Genial manners are good, and power of accom- 
modation to any circumstance ; hut the high prize 
of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born 
with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in em- 
ployment and happiness, — whether it be to make 
baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or 
songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Soc- 
rates, when he pronounced artists the only truly 
wise, as being actually, not apparently so. 

In childhood we fancied ourselves walled in by 
the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not. 
by distant travel we should reach the baths of the 
descending sun and stars. On experiment the ho- 
rizon flies before us and leaves us on an endless 
common, sheltered by no glass bell. Yet ’tis 
strange how tenaciously we cling to that bell-as- 
tronomy of a protecting domestic horizon. I find 
the same illusion in the search after happiness 
which I observe every summer recommenced in this 


254 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


neighborhood, soon after the pairing of the birds. 
The young people do not like the town, do not like 
the sea-shore, they will go inland ; find a dear cot- 
tage deep in the mountains, secret as their hearts. 
They set forth on their travels in search of a home : 
they reach Berkshire ; they reach Vermont ; they 
look at the farms ; — good farms, high mountain- 
sides; but where is the seclusion? The farm is 
near this, ’t is near that ; they have got far from 
Boston, but ’t is near Albany, or near Burlington, 
or near Montreal. They explore a farm, but the 
house is small, old, thin ; discontented people lived 
there and are gone ; — there ’s too much sky, too 
much out-doors ; too public. The youth aches for 
solitude. When he comes to the house he passes 
through the house. That does not make the deep 
recess he sought. 4 Ah ! now I perceive,’ he says, 
‘it must be deep with persons; friends only can 
give depth.’ Yes, but there is a great dearth, this 
year, of friends ; hard to find, and hard to have 
when found : they are just going away ; they too 
are in the whirl of the flitting world, and have en- 
gagements and necessities. They are just starting 
for Wisconsin; have letters from Bremen; — see 
you again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson 
that there is but one depth, but one interior, and 
that is — his purpose. When joy or calamity or 
genius shall show him it, then woods, then farms, 


CONSIDERATIONS BY TEE WAY. 255 


then city shopmen and cabdrivers, indifferently with 
prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its un- 
fathomable heaven, its populous solitude. 

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but 
the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversa- 
tion ; and this is a main function of life. What a 
difference in the hospitality of minds ! Inestimable 
is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to 
ourselves. Others are involuntarily hurtful to us 
and bereave us of the power of thought, impound 
and imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, 
there needs but one wise man in a company and 
all are wise, so a blockhead makes a blockhead of 
his companion. Wonderful power to benumb pos- 
sesses this brother. When he comes into the office 
or public room, the society dissolves ; one after an- 
other slips out, and the apartment is at his disposal. 
What is incurable but a frivolous habit ? A fly is 
as untamable as a hyena. Yet folly in the sense 
of fun, fooling or dawdling can easily be borne ; 
as Talleyrand said, “ I find nonsense singularly re- 
freshing ; ” but a virulent, aggressive fool taints 
the reason of a household. I have seen a whole 
family of quiet, sensible people unhinged and be- 
side themselves, victims of such a rogue. For the 
steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person ir- 
ritates the best ; since we must withstand absurdity. 
But resistance only exasperates the acrid fool, who 


256 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


believes that Nature and gravitation are quite 
wrong, and he only is right. Hence all the dozen 
inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues 
and industries they have, into contradictors, accus- 
ers, explainers and repairers of this one malefactor ; 
like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run 
away with, — not only the foolish pilot or driver, 
but everybody on board is forced to assume strange 
and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and 
prevent the upsetting. For remedy, whilst the 
case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth : 
let all the truth that is spoken or done be at the 
zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly. 
But when the case is seated and malignant, the 
only safety is in amputation ; as seamen say, you 
shall cut and run. How to live with unfit compan- 
ions? — for with such, life is for the most part 
spent ; and experience teaches little better than 
our earliest instinct of self-defence, namely not to 
engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with 
them, but let their madness spend itself unopposed. 

Conversation is an art in which a man has all 
mankind for his competitors, for it is that which 
all are practising every day while they live. Our 
habit of thought — take men as they rise, — is not 
satisfying; in the common experience I fear it is 
poor and squalid. The success which will content 
them is a bargain, a lucrative employment, an ad« 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 257 

vantage gained over a competitor, a marriage, a 
patrimony, a legacy, and the like. With these ob- 
jects, their conversation deals with surfaces : poli- 
tics, trade, personal defects, exaggerated bad news, 
and the rain. This is forlorn, and they feel sore 
and sensitive. Now if one comes who can illumi- 
nate this dark house with thoughts, show them 
their native riches, what gifts they have, how indis- 
pensable each is, what magical powers over nature 
and men ; what access to poetry, religion, and the 
powers which constitute character, — he wakes in 
them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require 
new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts 
and sciences ; — then we come out of our egg-shell 
existence into the great dome, and see the zenith 
over and the nadir under us. Instead of the 
tanks and buckets of knowledge to which we are 
daily confined, we come down to the shore of the 
sea, and dip our hands in its miraculous waves. 
’T is wonderful the effect on the company. They 
are not the men they were. They have all been to 
California and all have come back millionaires. 
There is no book and no pleasure in life comparable 
to it. Ask what is best in our experience, and we 
shall say, a few pieces of plain-dealing with wise 
people. Our conversation once and again has ap- 
prised us that we belong to better circles than we 
have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us 
ir 


VOL. VI. 


258 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


whose generalizations are more worth for joy and 
for effect than anything that is now called philoso- 
phy or literature. In excited conversation we have 
glimpses of the Universe, hints of power native to 
the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes 
landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone med- 
itation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, 
to which the memory goes back in barren hours. 

Add the consent of will and temperament, and 
there exists the covenant of friendship. Our chief 
want in life is somebody who shall make us do 
what we can. This is the service of a friend. 
With him we are easily great. There is a sublime 
attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us. How 
he flings wide the doors of existence ! What ques- 
tions we ask of him ! what an understanding we 
have ! how few words are needed ! It is the only 
real society. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Ta- 
leb, writes with sad truth : — 

“ He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, 

And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.” 

But few writers have said anything better to this 
point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the 
test of mental health : “ Thou learnest no secret 
until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound 
no heavenly knowledge enters.” Neither is life 
long enough for friendship. That is a serious and 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 259 


majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, 
and not a postilion’s dinner to be eaten on the run. 
There is a pudency about friendship as about love, 
and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet 
they do not name it. With the first class of men 
our friendship or good understanding goes quite 
behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, 
of reputation. And yet we do not provide for the 
greatest good of life. We take care of our health ; 
we lay up money ; we make our roof tight, and our 
clothing sufficient ; but who provides wisely that 
he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, 
— friends? We know that all our training is to 
fit us for this, and we do not take the step towards 
it. How long shall we sit and wait for these ben- 
efactors ? 

It makes no difference, in looking back five 
years, how you have been dieted or dressed ; 
whether you have been lodged on the first floor or 
the attic ; whether you have had gardens and baths, 
good cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat 
equipage, or in a ridiculous truck : these things are 
forgotten so quickly, and leave no effect. But it 
counts much whether we have had good compan- 
ions in that time, — almost as much as what we 
have been doing. And see the overpowering im- 
portance of neighborhood in all association. As 
it is marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, 


260 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


so it is who lives near us of equal social degree, — ■ 
a few people at convenient distance, no matter how 
bad company, — these, and these only, shall be 
your life’s companions ; and all those who are na- 
tive, congenial, and by many an oath of the heart 
sacramented to you, are gradually and totally lost. 
You cannot deal systematically with this fine el- 
ement of society, and one may take a good deal 
of pains to bring people together and to organ- 
ize clubs and debating societies, and yet no result 
come of it. But it is certain that there is a great 
deal of good in us that does not know itself, and 
that a habit of union and competition brings peo- 
ple up and keeps them up to their highest point ; 
that life would be twice or ten times life if spent 
with wise and fruitful companions. The obvious 
inference is, a little useful deliberation and pre- 
concert when one goes to buy house and land. 

But we live with people on other platforms ; 
we live with dependents ; not only with the young 
whom we are to teach all we know and clothe with 
the advantages we have earned, but also with those 
who serve us directly, and for money. Yet the old 
rules hold good. Let not the tie be mercenary, 
though the service is measured by money. Make 
yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life 
hard to any. This point is acquiring new impor- 
tance in American social life. Our domestic sen 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 261 

vice is usually a foolish fracas of unreasonable de- 
mand on one side and shirking on the other. A 
man of wit was asked, in the train, what was his 
errand in the city ? He replied, “ I have been sent 
to procure an angel to do cooking.” A lady com- 
plained to me that of her two maidens, one was 
absent-minded and the other was absent-bodied. 
And the evil increases from the ignorance and hos- 
tility of every ship-load of the immigrant population 
swarming into houses and farms. Few people dis- 
cern that it rests with the master or the mistress 
what service comes from the man or the maid; 
that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in one 
house and a haridan in the other. All sensible 
people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every 
contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are 
proposing only your own, the other party must deal 
a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the 
other, though selfish and unjust, will make an ex- 
ception in your favor, and deal truly with you. 
When I asked an iron-master about the slag and 
cinder in railroad iron, — “ O,” he said, “ there ’s 
always good iron to be had : if there ’s cinder 
in the iron it is because there was cinder in the 
pay.” 

But why multiply these topics, and their illus- 
trations, which are endless ? Life brings to each 
his task, and whatever art you select, algebra, 


262 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics, — » 
all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, 
on the same terms of selecting that for which you 
are apt ; begin at the beginning, proceed in order, 
step by step. ’T is as easy to twist iron anchors 
and braid cannons as to braid straw ; to boil granite 
as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. 
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, 
some superstition about luck, some step omitted, 
which Nature never pardons. The happy condi- 
tions of life may be had on the same terms. Their 
attraction for you is the pledge that they are within 
your reach. Our prayers are prophets. There 
must be fidelity, and there must be adherence. 
How respectable the life that clings to its objects ! 
Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories 
and plans of life are fair and commendable : — 
but will you stick ? Not one, I fear, in that Com- 
mon full of people, or, in a thousand, but one : and 
when you tax them with treachery, and remind 
them of their high resolutions, they have forgotten 
that they made a vow. The individuals are fugi- 
tive, and in the act of becoming something else, 
and irresponsible. The race is great, the ideal fair, 
but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he 
who is immovably centred. The main difference 
between people seems to be that one man can 
come under obligations on which you can rely, — is 


CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 263 


obligable ; and another is not. As he has not a 
law within him, there ’s nothing to tie him to. 

It is inevitable to name particulars of virtue and 
of condition, and to exaggerate them. But all rests 
at last on that integrity which dwarfs talent, and 
can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued 
by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position 
and for the culture of talent, but to the grand 
interests, superficial success is of no account. The 
man, — it is his attitude, — not feats, but forces, — 
not on set days and public occasions, but at all 
hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still for- 
midable and not to be disposed of. The populace 
says, with Horne Tooke, “ If you would be pow- 
erful, pretend to be powerful.” I prefer to say, 
with the old prophet, “ Seekest thou great things ? 
seek them not : ” — or, what was said of a Spanish 
prince, “ The more you took from him, the greater 
he looked.” Plus on lui 6te , plus il est grand. 

The secret of culture is to learn that a few great 
points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the 
obscurest farm and in the miscellany of metropol- 
itan life, and that these few are alone to be re- 
garded ; — the escape from all false ties ; courage 
to be what we are, and love of what is simple 
and beautiful ; independence and cheerful relation, 
these are the essentials, — these, and the wish to 
serve, to add somewhat to the well-being of men. 



VIE 


BEAUTY. 


Was never form and never face 
So sweet to Seyd as only grace 
Which did not slumber like a stone 
But hovered gleaming and was gone. 

Beauty chased he everywhere, 

In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. 

He smote the lake to feed his eye 

With the beryl beam of the broken wave c 
He flung in pebbles well to hear 

The moment’s music which they gave. 

Oft pealed for him a lofty tone 
From nodding pole and belting zone. 

He heard a voice none else could hear 
From centred and from errant sphere. 

The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, 

Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. 

In dens of passion, and pits of woe, 

He saw strong Eros struggling through, 

To sun the dark and solve the curse, 

And beam to the bounds of the universe.. 
While thus to love he gave his days 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

In loyal worship, scorning praise, 

How spread their lures for him, in vain, 
Thieving ambition and paltering Gain ! 
He thought it happier to be dead, 

To die for Beauty, than live for bread. 


BEAUTY. 


The spiral tendency of vegetation infects edu- 
cation also. Our books approach very slowly the 
things we most wish to know. What a parade we 
make of our science, and how far off and at arm’s 
length it is from its objects ! Our botany is all 
names, not powers : poets and romancers talk of 
herbs of grace and healing, but what does the bota- 
nist know of the virtues of his weeds ? The geolo- 
gist lays bare the strata and can tell them all on 
his fingers; but does he know what effect passes 
into the man who builds his house in them ? what 
effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? 
what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium ? 

We should go to the ornithologist with a new 
feeling if he could teach us what the social birds 
say when they sit in the autumn council, talking 
together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes 
his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead 
bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, 
but in its relations to Nature ; and the skin or skel- 
eton you show me is no more a heron, than a heap 
of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body 


268 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The 
naturalist is led from the road by the whole dis- 
tance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster 
views when he gazed at the shells on the beach 
or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them 
by their names, than the man in the pride of his 
nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied 
man to the system. Instead of an isolated "beggar, 
the farthest star felt him and he felt the star. 
However rash and however falsified by pretenders 
and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the 
soul’s avowal of its large relations, and that cli- 
mate, century, remote natures as well as near, are 
part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, 
but it does not construct. Alchemy, which sought 
to transmute one element into another, to prolong 
life, to arm with power, — that was in the right 
direction. All our science lacks a human side. 
The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and 
stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many 
years, are not finalities ; and man, when his powers 
unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, 
and emit light into all her recesses. The human 
heart concerns us more than the poring into micro- 
scopes, and is larger than can be measured by the 
pompous figures of the astronomer. 

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men 
hold themselves cheap and vile ; and yet a man is 


BEAUTY. 


269 


a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour 
through his system; he is the flood of the flood 
and fire of the fire ; he feels the antipodes and the 
pole as drops of his blood ; they are the extension 
of his personality. His duties are measured by that 
instrument he is; and a right and perfect man 
would be felt to the centre of the Copernican sys- 
tem. ’T is curious that we only believe as deep as 
we live. We do not think heroes can exert any 
more awful power than that surface - play which 
amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, 
waits for them, believes in magic, believes that 
the orator will decompose his adversary; believes 
that the evil eye can wither, that the heart’s bless- 
ing can heal ; that love can exalt talent ; can over- 
come all odds. From a great heart secret magnet- 
isms flow incessantly to draw great events. But 
we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, 
a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any ro- 
mance of character ; and perhaps reckon only his 
money value, his intellect, his affection, — as a sort 
of bill of exchange easily convertible into fine cham- 
bers, pictures, music, and wine. 

The motive of science was the extension of man, 
on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch 
the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears 
understand the language of beast and bird, and 
the sense of the wind ; and, through his sympathy, 


270 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

heaven and earth should talk with him. But that 
is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, 
astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us 
where they found us. The invention is of use to 
the inventor, of questionable help to any other. 
The formulas of science are like the papers in your 
pocket - book, of no value to any but the owner. 
Science in England, in America, is jealous of the- 
ory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. 
There’s a revenge for this inhumanity. What 
manner of man does science make ? The boy is 
not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such 
a kind of man as my professor is. The collector 
has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has 
lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and 
lizards in his phials, but science has done for him 
also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our re- 
liance on the physician is a kind of despair of our- 
selves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not 
seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready 
thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. 
An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the for- 
est, saw a herd of elk sporting. “ See how happy,” 
he said, “ these browsing elks are ! Why should 
not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the tem- 
ples, also amuse themselves ? ” Returning home, 
he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, 
on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, 


BEAUTY. 


271 


saying, “ Prince, administer this empire for seven 
days ; at the termination of that period I shall put 
thee to death.” At the end of the seventh day 
the king inquired, “From what cause hast thou be- 
come so emaciated?” He answered, “From the 
horror of death.” The monarch rejoined, “Live, 
my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take 
recreation, saying to thyself, In seven days I shall 
be put to death. These priests in the temple inces- 
santly meditate on death ; how can they enter into 
healthful diversions ? ” But the men of science or 
the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their 
pursuits more than others. The miller, the lawyer, 
and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own 
details, and do not come out men of more force. 
Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of 
soul, and the equality to any event which we de- 
mand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of 
the wares, of the chicane ? 

No object really interests us but man, and in 
man only his superiorities ; and though we are 
aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination 
for us only through its relation to him, or as it 
is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckel- 
mann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side 
with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, 
rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and 
perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a con- 


272 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


flagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowl- 
edge of manners, the power of form, and our sensi- 
bility to personal influence never go out of fashion. 
These are facts of a science which we study with- 
out book, whose teachers and subjects are always 
near us. 

So inveterate is our habit of criticism that much 
of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the 
chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street of- 
tener furnishes degradations than angels or redeem- 
ers, but they all prove the transparency. Every 
spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd 
guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not 
less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace 
and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the 
beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of 
sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, 
the passionate histories in the looks and manners of 
youth and early manhood, and the varied power in 
all that well-known company that escort us through 
life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, 
provoke, inspire, and enlarge us. 

Beauty is the form under which the intellect pre- 
fers to study the world. All privilege is that of 
beauty ; for there are many beauties ; as, of gen- 
eral nature, of the human face and form, of man- 
ners, of brain or method, moral beauty or beauty 
of the soul. 


BEAUTY. 


273 


The ancients believed that a genius or demon 
took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide 
him ; that these genii were sometimes seen as a 
flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which 
they governed ; on an evil man, resting on his head ; 
in a good man, mixed with his substance. They 
thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, 
entered a new-born child, and they pretended to 
guess the pilot by the sailing of the ship. W e rec- 
ognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it 
our own names. We say that every man is en- 
titled to be valued by his best moment. We meas- 
ure our friends so. We know they have intervals 
of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the 
reappearings of the genius, which are sure and 
beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows 
people who appear beridden, and who, with all 
degrees of ability, never impress us with the air 
of free agency. They know it too, and peep with 
their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We 
fancy, could we pronounce the solving word and 
disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little 
rider would be discovered and unseated, and they 
would regain their freedom. The remedy seems 
never to be far off, since the first step into thought 
lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the 
pent air -ball which can rive the planet, and the 
beauty which certain objects have for him is the 

VOL. VI. 18 


274 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


friendly fire which expands the thought and ac* 
quaints the prisoner that liberty and power await 
him. 

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces 
to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe 
said, “ The beautiful is a manifestation of secret 
laws of Nature which, but for this appearance, had 
been forever concealed from us.” And the work- 
ing of this deep instinct makes all the excitement 
— much of it superficial and absurd enough — 
about works of art, which leads armies of vain 
travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. 
Every man values every acquisition he makes in 
the science of beauty, above his possessions. The 
most useful man in the most useful world, so long 
as only commodity was served, would remain un- 
satisfied. But as fast as he sees beauty, life ac- 
quires a very high value. 

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers 
not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather 
enumerate a few of its qualities. W e ascribe beauty 
to that which is simple ; which has no superfluous 
parts ; which exactly answers its end ; which stands 
related to all things ; which is the mean of many 
extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the 
most ascending quality. We say love is blind, and 
the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round 
his eyes. Blind : yes, because he does not see what 


BEAUTY. 


275 


he does not like ; but the sharpest-sighted hunter 
in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, 
and only that; and the mythologists tell us that 
Vulcan was painted lame and Cupid blind, to call 
attention to the fact that one was all limbs, and 
the other all eyes. In the true mythology Love 
is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a 
guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than 
when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul. 

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and 
colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our 
perception that not one ornament was added for 
ornament, but each is a sign of some better health 
or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird 
or beast, or in the human figure, marks some ex- 
cellence of structure : or, beauty is only an invita- 
tion from what belongs to us. ’T is a law of bot- 
any that in plants the same virtues follow the same 
forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in 
a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the con- 
struction of any fabric or organism any real in- 
crease of fitness to its end is an increase of beauty. 

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of 
Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite paint- 
ing, was worth all the research, — namely, that all 
beauty must be organic ; that outside embellish- 
ment is deformity. It is the soundness of the 
bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom com- 


276 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


plexion ; health of constitution that makes the 
sparkle and the power of the eye. ’Tis the adjust- 
ment of the size and of the joining of the sock- 
ets of the skeleton that gives grace of outline and 
the finer grace of movement. The cat and the 
deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing- 
master can never teach a badly built man to walk 
well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its 
root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with 
its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects 
paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain 
of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that 
support nothing, and allows the real supporters of 
the house honestly to show themselves. Every 
necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. 
A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing 
seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the car- 
penter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or 
whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. 
But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How 
beautiful are ships on the sea ! but ships in the 
theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque effect on 
Virginia Water by George IV., and men hired to 
stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour ! 
What a difference in effect between a battalion of 
troops marching to action, and one of our inde- 
pendent companies on a holiday ! In the midst of 
a military show and a festal procession gay with 


BEAUTY. 


277 


banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay 
rusting under a wall, and poising it on the top of a 
stick, he set it turning and made it describe the 
most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away 
attention from the decorated procession by this 
startling beauty. 

Another text from the mythologists. The 
Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of 
the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or 
bounded, but only what streams with life, what is 
in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The 
pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye is, that 
an order and method has been communicated to 
stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become 
tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the 
moment of transition, as if the form were just 
ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, 
heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long 
nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse 
of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful 
as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can 
move we seek a more excellent symmetry. The 
interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to 
desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch 
the steps through which it is attained. This is the 
charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of 
birds and the locomotion of animals. This is the 
theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes 


278 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular 
but by gradual and curving movements. I have 
been told by persons of experience in matters of 
taste that the fashions follow a law of gradation, 
and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always 
only a step onward in the same direction as the 
last mode, and a cultivated eye is prepared for and 
predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the 
reason of all mistakes and offence in our own 
modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike 
a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate 
note or two to the accord again ; and many a good 
experiment, born of good sense and destined to suer 
ceed, fails only because it is offensively sudden. I 
suppose the Parisian milliner who dresses the world 
from her imperious boudoir will know how to rec- 
oncile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, 
and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by 
interposing the just gradations. I need not say 
how wide the same law ranges, and how much it 
can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly 
claimed by progressive parties may easily come to 
be conceded without question, if this rule be ob- 
served. Thus the circumstances may be easily im- 
agined in which woman may speak, vote, argue 
causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most 
naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. 
To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that 


BEAUTY ; 


279 


all circular movement has; as the circulation of 
waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical 
motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, 
the action and reaction of Nature ; and if we follow 
it out, this demand in our thought for an ever- 
onward action is the argument for the immortal- 
ity. 

One more text from the mythologists is to the 
same purpose, — Beauty rides on a lion . Beauty 
rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the re- 
sult of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is 
built at that angle which gives the most strength 
with the least wax ; the bone or the quill of the 
bird gives the most alar strength with the least 
weight. “ It is the purgation of superfluities,” said 
Michael Angelo. There is not a particle to spare 
in natural structures. There is a compelling rea- 
son in the uses of the plant for every novelty of 
color or form ; and our art saves material by more 
skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking 
every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a 
wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of 
columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a 
chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof 
of high culture to say the greatest matters in the 
simplest way. 

Veracity first of all, and forever. Itien de beau 
que le vrai. In all design, art lies in making your 


280 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


object prominent, but there is a prior art in choos- 
ing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have 
nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the 
nations that created them. 

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. 
In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of 
spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, 
for twenty years together, simply because the tal- 
low-man gave it the form of a rabbit ; and I sup- 
pose it may continue to be lugged about unchanged 
for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or 
figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of 
paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, 
is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the 
beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centu- 
ries. Burns writes a copy of verses and sends 
them to a newspaper, and the human race take 
charge of them that they shall not perish. 

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see 
how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of 
men, and is copied and reproduced without end. 
How many copies are there of the Belvedere 
Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, 
the Parthenon and the Temple of Vesta? These 
are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities an 
ugly building is soon removed and is never re- 
peated, but any beautiful building is copied and 
improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters 


BEAUTY. 281 

work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, 
whilst the ugly ones die out. 

The felicities of design in art or in works of 
Nature are shadows or forerunners of that beauty 
which reaches its perfection in the human form. 
All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes it cre- 
ates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted 
to it. It reaches its height in woman. “ To Eve,” 
say the Mahometans, “ God gave two thirds of all 
beauty.” A beautiful woman is a practical poet, 
taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, 
and eloquence in all whom she approaches. Some 
favors of condition must go with it, since a certain 
serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and 
superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should 
attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into 
her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 4 Yes, 
I am willing to attract, but to attract a little bet- 
ter kind of man than any I yet behold.’ French 
mSmoires of the sixteenth century celebrate the 
name of Pauline de Viguier, a virtuous and accom- 
plished maiden who so fired the enthusiasm of her 
contemporaries by her enchanting form, that the 
citizens of her native city of Toulouse obtained the 
aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear 
publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and 
as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dan- 
gerous to life. Not less in England in the last 


282 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


century was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom 
Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton, and Ma- 
ria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, “The 
concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Ham- 
ilton was presented at court, on Friday, that even 
the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on 
chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs 
at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and 
people go early to get places at the theatres, when 
it is known they will be there.” “ Such crowds,” 
he adds elsewhere, “ flock to see the Duchess of 
Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all 
night, in and about an inn in Yorkshire, to see her 
get into her post-chaise next morning.” 

But why need we console ourselves with the 
fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of 
Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton ? We all 
know this magic very well, or can divine it. It 
does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes 
never so long. Women stand related to beautiful 
Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes 
their form with moon and stars, with woods and 
waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of 
awkwardness by their w r ords and looks. We ob- 
serve their intellectual influence on the most serious 
student. They refine and clear his mind; teach 
him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and 
difficult. We talk to them and wish to be listened 


BEAUTY. 


283 


to ; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility 
of expression which passes from conversation into 
habit of style. 

That Beauty is the normal state is shown by the 
perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau 
had an ugly face on a handsome ground ; and we 
see faces every day which have a good type but 
have been marred in the casting ; a proof that we 
are all entitled to beauty, should have been beau- 
tiful if our ancestors had kept the laws, — ■ as every 
lily, and every rose is well. But our bodies do not 
fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short 
legs which constrain us to short mincing steps are 
a kind of personal insult and contumely to the 
owner ; and long stilts again put him at perpetual 
disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general 
level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman 
of his day whose countenance resembled the face 
of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes 
a schoolmaster “ so ugly and crabbed that a sight 
of him would derange the ecstasies of the ortho- 
dox.” Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but 
are a record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes 
of whim and folly. Portrait-painters say that most 
faces ainl forms are irregular and un symmetrical ; 
have one eye blue and one gray ; the nose not 
straight, and one shoulder higher than another ; the 
hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is phys- 


284 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


ieally as well as metaphysically a tiling of shreds 
and patches, borrowed unequally from good and 
bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. 

A beautiful person among the Greeks was 
thought to betray by this sign some secret favor 
of the immortal gods; and we can pardon pride, 
when a woman possesses such a figure that wher- 
ever she stands or moves or leaves a shadow on 
the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she 
confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is 
not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. 
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. 
Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbd Menage 
said of the President Le Bailleul that “ he was fit 
for nothing but to sit for his portrait.’’ A Greek 
epigram intimates that the force of love is not 
shown by the courting of beauty, but when the 
like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. 
And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to 
suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty peo- 
ple, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, 
or who see, after a world of pains have been suc- 
cessfully taken for the costume, how the least mis- 
take in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your 
clothes, — affirm that the secret of ugliness con- 
sists not in irregularity, but in being uninterest- 
ing. 

We love any forms, however ugly, from which 


BEAUTY. 


285 


great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art 
or invention exist in the most deformed person, 
all the accidents that usually displease, please, and 
raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator 
was an emaciated, insignificant person, hut he was 
all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, 
“ With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the per- 
spicacity of an eagle.” It was said of Hooke, the 
friend of Newton, “ He is the most, and promises 
the least, of any man in England.” “ Since I am 
so ugly,” said Du Guesclin, “ it behooves that I be 
bold.” Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, 
Ben Jonson tells us, “ was no pleasant man in 
countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, 
and of high blood, and long.” Those who have 
ruled human destinies like planets for thousands 
of years, were not handsome men. If a man can 
raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make 
bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by 
canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can 
lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowl- 
edge, — ’t is no matter whether his nose is parallel 
to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has 
a nose at all; whether his legs are straight, or 
whether his legs are amputated : his deformities 
will come to be reckoned ornamental and advan- 
tageous on the whole. This is the triumph of 
expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a 


286 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


power so fine and friendly and intoxicating that it 
makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of 
passing our lives with them insupportable. There 
are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and 
rippled by the play of thought that we can hardly 
find what the mere features really are. When the 
delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is 
because a more delicious beauty has appeared ; that 
an interior and durable form has been disclosed. 
Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still, “ it 
was for beauty that the world was made.” The 
lives of the Italian artists, who established a despot- 
ism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs 
of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all 
times are to a finer brain, a finer method than their 
own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone 
gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it 
all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable 
meaning ; — if a man can build a plain cottage 
with such symmetry as to make all the fine pal- 
aces look cheap and vulgar ; can take such advan- 
tages of Nature that all her powers serve him ; 
making use of geometry, instead of expense ; tap- 
ping a mountain for his water-jet ; causing the sun 
and moon to seem only the decorations of his es- 
tate ; — this is still the legitimate dominion of 
beauty. 

The radiance of the human form, though some- 


BEAUTY. 


287 


times astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a 
few years or a few months at the perfection of 
youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we re- 
main lovers of it, only transferring our interest to 
interior excellence. And it is not only admirable 
in singular and salient talents, but also in the world 
of manners. 

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. 
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, hand- 
some, but, until they speak to the imagination, not 
yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is 
still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet 
possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, “ It 
swims on the light of forms.” It is properly not in 
the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts pos- 
session, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I 
could put my hand on the North Star, would it be 
as beautiful ? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe 
in it the beauty forsakes all the near water. For 
the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at 
the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of “ a 
light that never was on sea or land,” meaning that 
it was supplied by the observer; and the Welsh 
bard warns his countrywomen, that 

— “ Half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die.” 

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful 
is a certain cosmical quality, or a power to suggest 


288 


CONDUCT OF LIFE . 


relation to the whole world, and so lift the object 
out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural fea- 
ture, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone — 
has in it somewhat which is not private but uni- 
versal, speaks of that central benefit which is the 
soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And in 
chosen men and women I find somewhat in form, 
speech, and manners, which is not of their person 
and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual 
character, and we love them as the sky. They 
have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and 
manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and 
justice. 

The feat of the imagination is in showing the 
convertibility of every thing into every other thing. 
Facts which had never before left their stark com- 
mon sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. 
My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in 
disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts 
in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make 
the grammar of the eternal language. Every word 
has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. 
What ! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom ? 
I cry you mercy, good shoe-box ! I did not know 
you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to 
sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. 
And there is a joy in perceiving the representative 
or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact 


BEAUTY. 


289 


or event can ever give. There are no days in 
life so memorable as those which vibrated to some 
stroke of the imagination. 

The poets are quite right in decking their mis- 
tresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower- 
gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning and 
stars of night, since all beauty points at identity ; 
and whatsoever thing does not express to me the 
sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden 
and wrong. Into every beautiful object there en- 
ters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just 
as much into form bounded by outlines, like moun- 
tains on the horizon, as into tones of music or 
depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret 
architecture of bodies ; and when the second-sight 
of the mind is opened, now one color or form or 
gesture and now another has a pungency, as if a 
more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its 
deep holdings in the frame of things. 

The laws of this translation we do not know, or 
why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word 
or syllable intoxicates; but the fact is familiar that 
the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or 
a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders ; 
as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away 
mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a 
truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This 
is that haughty force of beauty, “ vis superha 

VOL. vi. 19 


290 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


formce” which the poets praise, — under calm 
and precise outline the immeasurable and divine; 
Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm 
sky. 

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and 
I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus 
Antoninus ; and the beauty ever in proportion to 
the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, 
however decorated, seem impure shambles ; but 
character gives splendor to youth and awe to 
wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth 
we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who 
has shared with us the moral sentiment, — her 
locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a 
climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable 
sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain 
affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details 
of the landscape, features of the human face and 
form, signs and tokens of thought and character in 
manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the intel- 
lect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend : 
an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, 
up to the perception of Newton that the globe on 
which we ride is only a larger apple falling from 
a larger tree ; up to the perception of Plato that 
globe and universe are rude and early expressions 
of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the 
scale to the temple of the Mind. 


IX. 


ILLUSIONS. 


Flow, flow the waves hated, 
Accursed, adored, 

The waves of mutation : 

No anchorage is. 

Sleep is not, death is not ; 
Who seem to die live. 

House you were born in, 
Friends of your spring-time, 
Old man and young maid, 
Day’s toil and its guerdon, 
They are all vanishing, 
Fleeing to fables, 

Cannot he moored. 

See the stars through them, 
Through treacherous marbles. 
Know, the stars yonder, 

The stars everlasting, 

Are fugitive also, 

And emulate, vaulted, 

The lambent heat-lightning, 
And fire-fly’s flight. 


292 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


When thou dost return 
On the wave’s circulation, 
Beholding the shimmer, 

The wild dissipation, 

And, out of endeavor 
To change and to flow 
The gas become solid, 

And phantoms and nothings 
Return to be things, 

And endless imbroglio 
Is law and the world, — 
Then first shalt thou know., 
That in the wild turmoil, 
Horsed on the Proteus, 
Thou ridest to power, 

And to endurance. 


ILLUSIONS. 


Some years ago, in company with an agreeable 
party, I spent a long summer day in exploring 
the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, 
through spacious galleries affording a solid ma- 
sonry foundation for the town and county overhead, 
the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the 
cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit, 
— a niche or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, 
and called, I believe, Serena’s Bower. I lost the 
light of one day. I saw high domes and bottom- 
less pits ; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls ; 
paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo 
River, whose waters are peopled with the blind 
fish ; crossed the streams “ Lethe ” and “ Styx ; ” 
plied with music and guns the echoes in these 
alarming galleries ; saw every form of stalagmite 
and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted cham- 
bers ; — icicle, orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and 
snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults 
and groins of the sparry cathedrals and examined 
all the masterpieces which the four combined en- 
gineers, water, limestone, gravitation and time 
could make in the dark. 


294 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the 
same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, 
and which shames the fine things to which we fop- 
pishly compare them. I remarked especially the 
mimetic habit with which Nature, on new instru- 
ments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic 
day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then 
took notice and still chiefly remember that the best 
thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion. 
On arriving at what is called the “ Star-Chamber,” 
our lamps were taken from us by the guide and 
extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, 
I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick 
with stars glimmering more or less brightly over 
our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming 
among them. All the party were touched with 
astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends 
sung with much feeling a pretty song, “ The stars 
are in the quiet sky,” &c., and I sat down on the 
rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crys- 
tal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, re- 
flecting the light of a lialf-liid lamp, yielded this 
magnificent effect. 

I own I did not like the cave so well for eking 
out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But 
I have had many experiences like it, before and 
since ; and we must be content to be pleased with- 
out too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our 


ILLUSIONS. 


295 


conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. 
The cloucl-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rain- 
bows and Northern Lights are not quite so spheral 
as our childhood thought them, and the part our 
organization plays in them is too large. The senses 
interfere everywhere and mix their own structure 
with all they report of. Once we fancied the earth 
a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset 
we do not yet deduct the rounding, co-ordinating, 
pictorial powers of the eye. 

The same interference from our organization cre- 
ates the most of our pleasure and pain. Our first 
mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the 
joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an 
ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide ; and the 
fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the 
switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer 
in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in 
the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister 
with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a 
certain pleasure to their employment, which they 
themselves give it. Health and appetite impart 
the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy 
that our civilization has got on far, but we still 
come back to our primers. 

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, 
by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of 
illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed. 


296 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy ! how dear 
the story of barons and battles ! What a hero he 
is, whilst he feeds on his heroes ! What a debt is 
his to imaginative books ! He has no better friend 
or influence than Scott, Sliakspeare, Plutarch, and 
Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who 
dare affirm that they are more real? Even the 
prose of the streets is full of refractions. In the 
life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all 
details and colors them with rosy hue. He imi- 
tates the air and actions of people whom he ad- 
mires, and is raised in his own eyes. He pays a 
debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. 
He wishes the bow and compliment of some leader 
in the state or in society ; weighs what he says ; 
perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but 
dies at last better contented for this amusement of 
his eyes and his fancy. 

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. 
In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, 
the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. No- 
body drops his domino. The unities, the fictions 
of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. 
The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is 
paint ; nay, God is the painter ; and we rightly 
accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. 
Society does not love its unmaskers. It was wittily 
if somewhat bitterly said by D’Alembert, “ qu'un 


ILLUSIONS. 


297 


Hat de vapeur etait un Hat tres fdcheux , parce- 
qu’il nous faisait voir les choses comme dies sont.” 
I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. 
Children, youths, adults and old men, all are led 
by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess 
of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s Mocking, 
— for the Power has many names, — is stronger 
than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. Few have 
overheard the gods or surprised their secret. Life 
is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be 
understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle 
is another riddle. There are as many pillows of il- 
lusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from 
one dream into another dream. The toys to be 
sure are various, and are graduated in refinement 
to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man 
requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. 
But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and 
the pageant marches at all hours, with music and 
banner and badge. 

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the chari- 
vari, comes now and then a sad - eyed boy whose 
eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the 
show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a ten- 
dency to trace home the glittering miscellany of 
fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a search 
after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in 
all corners. At the State Fair a friend of mine 


298 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


complained that all the varieties of fancy pears in 
our orchards seem to have been selected by some- 
body who had a whim for a particular kind of pear, 
and only cultivated such as had that perfume ; they 
were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of an- 
other youth with the confectioners, that when he 
racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the 
shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he 
could find only three flavors, or two. What then ? 
Pears and cakes are good for something ; and be- 
cause you unluckily have an eye or nose too keen, 
why need you spoil the comfort which the rest of 
us find in them ? I knew a humorist who in a 
good deal of rattle had a grain or two of sense. 
He shocked the company by maintaining that the 
attributes of God were two, — power and risibility, 
and that it was the duty of every pious man to 
keep up the comedy. And I have known gentle- 
men of great stake in the community, but whose 
sympathies were cold, — presidents of colleges and 
governors and senators, — who held themselves 
bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act 
with Bible societies and missions and peace-makers, 
and cry Hist-a-boy 1 to every good dog. W e must 
not carry comity too far, but we all have kind im- 
pulses in this direction. When the boys come into 
my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own 
I enter into Nature’s game, and affect to grant the 


ILLUSIONS. 


299 


permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment 
they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. 
But this tenderness is quite unnecessary ; the en- 
chantments are laid on very thick. Their young 
life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears 
is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yester- 
day ; yet not the less they hung it round with frip- 
pery romance, like the children of the happiest for- 
tune, and talked of “ the dear cottage where so 
many joyful hours had flown.” Well, this thatch- 
ing of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, 
more than all, are the element and kingdom of 
illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate. They 
see through Claude-Lorraines. And how dare any 
one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses , stage 
effects and ceremonies, by which th ^five ? Too 
pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and 
its atmosphere always liable to mirage. 

We are not very much to blame for our bad 
marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this 
especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and 
all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty 
Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt 
that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into 
the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious 
benefits and some great joys. We find a delight 
in the beauty and happiness of children that makes 
the heart too big for the body. In the worst-as- 


800 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

sorted connections there is ever some mixture of 
true marriage. Teague and his jade get some just 
relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and 
fostering of each other ; learn something, and would 
carry themselves wiselier if they were now to begin. 

’T is fine for us to point at one or another fine 
madman, as if there were any exempts. The scholar 
in his library is none. I, who have all my life 
heard any number of orations and debates, read 
poems and miscellaneous books, conversed with 
many geniuses, am still the victim of any new 
page ; and if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, 
or any other, invent a new style or mythology, I 
fancy that the world will be all brave and right if 
dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. 
Then at on^ d will daub with this new paint; but 
it will not stick. ’T is like the cement which the 
peddler sells at the door ; he makes broken crock- 
ery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a 
bit of the cement which will make it hold when he 
is gone. 

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail 
themselves of a certain fate in their constitution 
which they know how to use. But they never 
deeply interest us unless they lift a corner of the 
curtain, or betray, never so slightly, their penetra- 
tion of what is behind it. ’T is the charm of prac- 
tical men that outside of their practicality are a 


ILLUSIONS. 


301 


certain poetry and play, as if they led the good 
horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, 
though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is in- 
tellectual, as well as Caesar ; and the best soldiers, 
sea-captains and railway men have a gentleness 
when off duty, a good-natured admission that there 
are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their 
sport? We stigmatize the cast-iron fellows who 
cannot so detach themselves, as “dragon-ridden,” 
“ thunder-stricken,” and fools of fate, with what- 
ever powers endowed. 

Since our tuition is through emblems and indi- 
rections, it is well to know that there is method in 
it, a fixed scale and rank above rank in the phan- 
tasms. We begin low with coarse masks and rise 
to the most subtle and beautiful. The red men 
told Columbus “ they had an herb which took away 
fatigue ; ” but he found the illusion of “ arriving 
from the east at the Indies” more composing to 
his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith 
in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than 
narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, 
horse and gun, estates and politics ; but there are 
finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy ? 
Life will show you masks that are worth all your 
carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into 
your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur 
in Orion, “ the portentous year of Mizar and Al- 


302 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


cor,” must come down and be dealt with in your 
household thought. What if you shall come to 
discern that the play and playground of all this 
pompous history are radiations from yourself, and 
that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible 
questions we are learning to ask ! The former men 
believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and 
men were swallowed up, and all trace of them 
gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic 
which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of 
theism and beliefs which they and their fathers 
held and were framed upon. 

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of 
the passions, and the structural, beneficent illusions 
of sentiment and of the intellect. There is the 
illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved 
person all which that person shares with his or her 
family, sex, age, or condition, nay, with the human 
mind itself. ’T is these which the lover loves, and 
Anna Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one 
shut up always in a tower, with one window through 
which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, 
should fancy that all the marvels he beheld be- 
longed to that window. There is the illusion of 
time, which is very deep ; who has disposed of it ? 
— or come to the conviction that what seems the 
succession of thought is only the distribution of 
wholes into causal series ? The intellect sees that 


ILLUSIONS. 


303 


every atom carries the whole of Nature ; that the 
mind opens to omnipotence ; that, in the endless 
striving and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire, 
so that the soul doth not know itself in its own act 
when that act is perfected. There is illusion that 
shall deceive even the elect. There is illusion that 
shall deceive even the performer of the miracle. 
Though he make his body, he denies that he makes 
it. Though the world exist from thought, thought 
is daunted in presence of the world. One after 
*tlie other we accept the mental laws, still resisting 
those which follow, which however must be ac- 
cepted. But all our concessions only compel us to 
new profusion. And what avails it that science 
has come to treat space and time as simply forms 
of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, 
and withal our pretension of property and even of 
self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even 
our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant 
flowing and ascension reach these also, and each 
thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is 
yielding to a larger generalization ? 

With such volatile elements to work in, Tis no 
wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We 
must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the 
value of what we say or do. The cloud is now 
as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. 
That story of Thor, who was set to drain the drink- 


304 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


ing-liorn in Asgard and to wrestle witli the old 
woman and to run with the runner Lok, and pres- 
ently found that he had been drinking up the sea, 
and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, 
• — describes us, who are contending, amid these 
seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Na- 
ture. We fancy we have fallen into bad company 
and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken 
glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher’s meat, sugar, 
milk, and coal. 4 Set me some great task, ye gods ! 
and I will show my spirit.* 4 Not so,’ says the 
good Heaven ; 4 plod and plough, vamp your old 
coats and hats, weave a shoestring ; great affairs 
and the best wine by and by.’ Well, ’t is all 
phantasm ; and if we weave a yard of tape in all 
humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we 
shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some 
galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were 
Time and Nature. 

W e cannot write the order of the variable winds. 
How can we penetrate the law of our shifting 
moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all 
and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yester- 
day, which our eyes require, it is to-day an egg- 
shell which coops us in ; we cannot even see what 
or where our stars of destiny are. From day to 
day the capital facts of human life are hidden from 
our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up and reveals 


ILLUSIONS . 


805 


them, and we think how much good time is gone 
that might have been saved had any hint of these 
things been shown. A sudden rise in the road 
shows us the system of mountains, and all the sum- 
mits, which have been just as near us all the year, 
but quite out of mind. But these alternations are 
not without their order, and we are parties to our 
various fortune. If life seem a succession of 
dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. 
The visions of good men are good ; it is the undis- 
ciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and 
bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose 
our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in 
hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from 
one folly to another ; and it cannot signify much 
what becomes of such castaways, wailing, stupid, 
comatose creatures, lifted from bed to bed, from 
the nothing of life to the nothing of death. 

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for 
stays and foundations. There is none but a strict 
and faithful dealing at home and a severe barring 
out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever 
games are played with us, we must play no games 
with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last 
honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and 
childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root 
of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you 
think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. 

vol. vi. 20 


306 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my 
word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot 
be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the 
Sclat in the universe. This reality is the founda- 
tion of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the 
top or at the bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat 
which still leads us to work and live for appear- 
ances ; in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, 
that it is what we really are that avails, with friends, 
with strangers, and with fate or fortune. 

One would think from the talk of men that 
riches and poverty were a great matter ; and our 
civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say 
that they do not think the white man, with his brow 
of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and 
keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. 
The permanent interest of every man is never to 
be in a false position, but to have the weight of 
Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches 
and poverty are a thick or thin costume ; and our 
life — the life of all of us — identical. For we 
transcend the circumstance continually and taste 
the real quality of existence ; as in our employ- 
ments, which only differ in the manipulations but 
express the same laws ; or in our thoughts, which 
wear no silks and taste no ice-creams. We see 
God face to face every hour, and know the savor 
of Nature. 


ILLUSIONS. 


307 


The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and 
Xenophanes measured their force on this problem 
of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said that un- 
less the atoms were made of one stuff, they could 
never blend and act with one another. But the 
Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the live- 
liest feeling, both of the essential identity and of 
that illusion which they conceive variety to be. 
“ The notions, am,' and 4 This is mine,' which 
influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother 
of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures ! the 
conceit of knowledge which proceeds from igno- 
rance.” And the beatitude of man they hold to lie 
in being freed from fascination. 

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of 
truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws 
of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of 
Right are not broken by the disguise. There need 
never be any confusion in these. In a crowded 
life of many parts and performers, on a stage of 
nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or 
California, the same elements offer the same choices 
to each new comer, and, according to his election, 
he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature. It would 
be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy 
than the Persians have thrown into a sentence : — 

“ Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise : 

Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.” 


808 


CONDUCT OF LIFE. 


There is no chance and no anarchy in the uni- 
verse. All is system and gradation. Every god 
is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal 
enters the hall of the firmament ; there is he alone 
with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions 
and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. 
On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms 
of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd 
which sways this way and that and whose move- 
ment and doings he must obey : he fancies himself 
poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd 
drives hither and thither, now furiously command- 
ing this thing to be done, now that. What is he 
that he should resist their will, and think or act for 
himself ? Every moment new changes and new 
showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. 
And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears 
and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still 
sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone 
with him alone. 















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